


The Ghost of the Red Keep

by TheDameintheRaininMaine



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Friendship, Hidden Children, Secret Relationship, gothic literature and fairy tale influenced, instead of the madwoman in the attic we have the king's bastard in a cellar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22731064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDameintheRaininMaine/pseuds/TheDameintheRaininMaine
Summary: Lysa never sent her letter. Bran was never pushed. Five Starks make the journey to King's Landing.And one day beneath the Red Keep, Arya hears a voice she decides must be a ghost.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters
Comments: 146
Kudos: 428
Collections: Still Rowing: A Gendrya Centric Fanfic Collection





	1. Chapter 1

Arya is one and ten when she first hears the voice. 

The cat Syrio had been having her chase had led her deep into the vaults and cellars of the Red Keep. Or perhaps she let it lead her there. An excuse to go exploring, if a weak one. 

The dragon skulls had been a great find, the pale white figures staring down at her. She can scarcely imagine beasts that big even existing. 

She whispers about these to Sansa and Bran when she returns back to the Tower of the Hand. 

Sansa threatens to tell on her for wandering off, and Arya privately vows to never tell her fun things she discovers again. 

Bran is interested, terribly, but balks when Arya offers to take him down to see them. 

“I can’t sneak away as well as you can,” is his excuse, and Arya only feels a little bad when she accuses him of being scared. He’d been scared of the crypts in Winterfell so he’s quick to claim he’s not. 

He is right though, since they’ve all come to King’s Landing, it’s been harder for Arya to shirk her lessons. She can only blame getting lost so many times, even if the Red Keep IS huge and unfamiliar and full of interesting hallways. 

Thank all the gods for Syrio’s dancing lessons. The strange assignments he gives her are perfect for a getaway. The cats especially, she can blame for having a mind of their own. 

The second time she sneaks down to see the dragon skulls, is when she hears the voice. 

It’s not a scary voice, though the setting would expect it. It’s awfully dark down here, only with an occasional torch, no natural light whatsoever. It’s dark and quiet, and strangely warm. Arya dislikes that. True as a northerner she’s used to darkness, it’s the artificial nature of the darkness down here that she distrusts. It’s the sort of darkness that hides secrets. 

The voice sounds young, and she can’t make out any actual words. She also doesn’t see who the voice is attached to. 

When she returns to her lessons, she whispers to Sansa, 

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

Sansa looks at her with a withering gaze. They had supposed to be working on learning the proper depths of a curtsy based on the rank of the person they are meeting. 

“You’ve heard Old Nan’s stories. Ghosts are left behind by people who die tragically and can’t move on.”

Arya ponders her words.The Red Keep has been the site of lots of violence, from the battles in the days of old to the execution of her own grandfather and uncle. It made perfect sense to her that it might have a ghost.

“I think there’s a ghost under the castle,” she tells Bran that night.

The two of them had snuck off into the Godswood after supper. Summer, Lady and Nymeria are supposed to stay there all day, so as not to frighten and upset the servants. Sometimes Bran and her sneak theirs up the stairs at night, for the most part, the wolves seem content among the trees. 

They scavenged a pair of long branches to use as swords, and he’s trying to show her what he’s been learning during training. Once she offered to show Bran the moves that she learned from Syrio, he became more willing to show her what he learned in return.

“Like a person ghost, or a dragon ghost?”

Arya pauses a moment, in thought. Bran takes that moment to strike the stick from her hands. She only pouts for a moment before answering, because his question caught her off guard.

“Do dragons even have ghosts?”

“They must,” Bran tells her, “They bond with people. They understand words- that’s why the dragon riders all spoke Valyrian. They should be able to die and leave something behind.”

Arya suddenly wonders if their wolves have souls like them. Bran’s right, they must. But then she shakes her head, because it’s beside the point. 

“No, it must have been a person ghost, I heard it talking.”

“What did it say?”

Arya frowns. 

“I couldn’t hear it.”

Bran makes a face. 

“Well it doesn’t sound like an interesting ghost.”

And then he knocks her stick from her hands again, so her focus shifts. She doesn’t think about her ghost again until later that night, lying in bed, trying to sleep. 

What could the ghost have left keeping it to the world? 

The next week is full of hustle and bustle, and so Arya doesn’t get any time to sneak away and try and catch her ghost. 

One morning, someone comes and escorts Sansa away from the breakfast table. 

“What’s going on?” Arya asks her mother. 

Catelyn reaches underneath the table and squeezes Arya’s hand, both, she assumes, to provide comfort, and also to stop her from bolting. 

“Your sister’s betrothal to Prince Joffrey has been made official. The Queen wishes to speak to her.”

“Sansa’s really going to get married?” Bran asks through a mouth of bacon.

Catelyn smiles, but her lips are tight.

“Not for a few years. I convinced Cersei that it would be more appropriate to wait until her moon’s blood comes reliably every moon, rather than when she first flowers.”

Arya notes the pucker on her mother’s lips, and feels a private joy that she seems to find Prince Joffrey as odious as she does. 

And once that whole mess has passed through, the end of the week is Arya’s twelfth name-day. 

Her gift that year is unexpectedly nice too, a brand new saddle. It’s made of shiny brown leather, and Arya spends the morning in the stable, oiling it until it shines. After breakfast, Myrcella invites her to go for a ride, so she even gets to try it out. 

Myrcella’s twice as giggly as Sansa is, but she’s never been mean, so Arya decides to go.

When she buckles the straps, Arya wonders why the saddle has an extra stirrup on one side and the back is raised unusually high. 

“Oh, that’s in case you want to ride sidesaddle like some southern ladies do,” Myrcella tells her, mounting her own horse. 

Arya makes a face. Of course there’s a catch.

“Not that you have to,” Myrcella tells her, arranging her skirts atop her own mount. “Only the very most proper ladies do. The other couple sidesaddles I’ve seen are basically plush armchairs stuck to a horse’s back, you can’t even control the horse. Even Mother rides astride, on the rare occasion when she doesn’t take a litter or the wheelhouse of course.”

And Myrcella’s riding normally too, so Arya figures it’s okay. She looks back at the princess, who’s chosen to wear a dress with an extra voluminous skirt so that it doesn’t impede her at all. She suspects that might be her mother’s next move when she realizes she won’t be able to keep Arya off her horse. At least the other ladies here enjoyed riding too, Sansa never did. 

The hump in the back of the saddle feels really strange pressed in Arya’s rump, but she’s still small enough that she fits over the front easily enough, with her legs astride, and it’s not like they’re riding very fast.

They don’t go very far, or very fast. They can’t really gallop until they go into the Kingswood proper, and Arya knows the guards who are riding with them would never allow it. 

It is very nice to not be stuck sitting inside all day though. 

About halfway through the ride, Arya asks her,

“Do you ever hear ghost voices down below the castle?”

Myrcella furrows her brow. 

“I don’t think so. I think the castle probably has at least a few ghosts, but I’ve never heard them. I did hear some voices down in one of the cellars when my septa was teaching me the going ons of the castle proper. I think she must have thought they were ghosts too, because she sent me away. I wasn’t frightened, I think it was just Varys talking to some of his little birds. They need secret places to do that after all.”

Arya frowns, and lets Myrcella natter on and change the subject. She’s pretty sure she would have recognized Varys’s voice, and it didn’t sound like more than one person. 

Her name-day supper with her family is nice. They even bring up lemoncakes for dessert, and Arya’s extra pleased that someone remembered it wasn’t just Sansa who liked them.

She lays in her bed that night and decides that as a now very grown girl of two and ten, that she should go and seek out her ghost. 

She begs off Syrio’s lesson in the afternoon, claiming illness. He looks her up and down and declares, “the dance does not wait for good health,” before tapping her with the practice sword and declaring, “Though it would be good for you to develop bad habits so early on” and dismisses her.

She speeds away, excited. She would feel poorly about skipping out on his lessons were it for her justification that she was already using the skills he had taught her. 

She’s glad for being small, and being able to make herself quiet now. Quiet as a mouse, that’s what she is, creeping in down below the castle cellars.

It’s quiet down here too, and she doesn’t hear any voices at all, ghost or otherwise. She does find a couple of interesting things though. 

She goes by the stores of preserved meats and jams. It smells sort of nice, like spices and burlap. It is also, as far as Arya knows, supposed to be the last of the cellar rooms, but this was where she turned off and found the dragon skulls. Which means the next room she finds isn’t supposed to be there. 

She doesn’t see much, a straw mattress with a ragged blanket on the ground and a small trunk at the end of it, before she feels movement behind her and lets out a yelp and pushes. 

The figure that she’s pushed falls back against a box full of pickle jars and lands with an “Oof!”. Huh, that was strange, Arya didn’t think ghosts could feel pain. 

“You’re not supposed to be down here. The kitchen girls only come down here right before and after breakfast,” he says. It’s the same voice she heard before, Arya’s sure of it.

“I’m not a kitchen girl,” she says with a touch of indignation. It normally wouldn’t bother her, but he was the one who snuck up on her. “My father’s hand of the king.”

The figure chuckles. Arya can get a better look at him now, despite the low light. He’s a boy- well, close to a man maybe- he’s big even though his face is still youthful. Arya guesses he’s older than Sansa but maybe not as old as Jon or Robb. He has a shock of black hair- it’s messy so she guesses he’s been working- and strangely bright blue eyes. And now he’s begun to chuckle. 

“Then you’re really not supposed to be down here, and you really shouldn’t have seen me.”

He looks her up and down, and Arya feels like she will need to defend her messy braid or her worn clothes that used to be Bran’s. 

But all he does is look at his feet and add a “Milady.”

Arya feels her indignation grow into annoyance, and so she shoves him again. 

He sputters, and Arya’s pretty sure she hears ‘not a very good lady though’, so she says. 

“Don’t call me that. And what do you care, you’re a ghost?”

The boy stands up with a huff, 

“I’m not a ghost, I’m a blacksmith.”

Well that makes no sense. 

“If you’re a blacksmith how come you’re down in a cellar during the day instead of in the forge doing blacksmith-y things?”

“Ask myself that a lot. I used to be an apprentice in Flea Bottom. Wasn’t great but I got to see the sun at least. Then old Jon Arryn shows up asking me questions, next thing I know he’s dragging me off, and the queen shows up and she tells me I’m going to work in the castle smithy but I have to sleep down here and get up to the forge before the sun comes up and be back down here right after dinner, and- wait, why am I telling you this?”

Arya furrows her brow and shrugs. If he wants to tell her this, he can, he seems nice enough. Maybe he’s not a ghost, maybe he’s just lonely.

“Jon Arryn’s dead though,” she blurts out.

The boy looks alarmed. 

“He is?”

She nods, 

“Six moons ago. That’s why we came here, because my father’s King Robert’s new hand. “

His eyes become downcast. 

“That must be why…”

“What?”

He sits on the end of the bed, his mouth set in a hard line.

“I’m not supposed to go anywhere but the smithy, or to use the privy around the corner. Master Mott brings us both dinner every midday, and when I first got here someone would leave a basket of food every few days. But for about six moons, it hasn’t happened, and the queen warned me that everything in these cellars are strictly inventoried”

Arya is horrified. 

“You’ve been doing blacksmith work on one meal a day?”

She had used to watch Mikken in the forge at Winterfell, watched him pour the molten metal into molds and hammer at the results. The work had looked hot and sweaty and most of all, strenuous. 

Arya jumps up, 

“Give me fifteen minutes.”

She leaves the cellars, and makes for the castle gardens. Most of the plants in it are ornamental, only planted to look pretty. Useless for Arya’s goal. But against one wall, several trees from the walled-off kitchen gardens hang their branches over. 

On the end of one of them is a huge, rosy pink, fuzzy cheeked peach. She can nearly reach it if she just stretches a little bit further-

“Arya!” she hears a voice admonish behind her. Arya jerks stiff, turning her back to face the wall, tucking her hands behind her back. 

It’s just Sansa, dressed in an immaculate gown and not a hair out of place in her fancy Southern style.

Arya sticks out her bottom lip and looks at her sister through her eyelashes. That look used to get her out of quite a bit of trouble when she was younger, Jon in particular had a hard time saying no to it. As she’s gotten older, she’s done her best not to abuse it. 

This isn’t abusing it, it isn’t even for her at all. 

“I just wanted a peach,” she tells her sister, in her most pleading of voices. 

Sansa looks exasperated for a moment, but then the face Arya’s seen her wear less and less often appears. The face of her sister. 

Sansa reaches up and plucks the peach with ease. It’s not fair, Arya thinks, why does Sansa get to be so tall when she’s not even going to do anything with it? She hands it to Arya, and turns to leave with a, 

“Don’t spoil your supper.”

Arya sneaks a cheese tart off a plate, left behind for a servant, before returning to the cellar. 

She presents them to the boy with the blue eyes with a grin, and a, 

“Sorry, I didn’t ask your name.”

The boy eyes the bits in her hands, before taking the tart, and chomping down on it in two bites. He wipes the crumbs from his chin before beginning to work on the peach. 

“S’okay,” he says through the crumbs, “I didn’t ask yours either.

“I’m Arya, of House Stark,” she tells him with pride, her chest slightly puffed up.

“Seven hells,” he mutters through his full mouth, “What’s a fine lady doing running around in a cellar? Shouldn’t you be learning how to curtsy, or look down your nose at people like me?”

Arya wrinkles her nose.

“I’m not that kind of lady. And besides, I thought you were a ghost, that’s why I came down here.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you were looking for ghosts in cellars.”

Arya looks up and down at him guiltily. 

“Because otherwise I’d be upstairs learning to curtsy. It’s not fair! My brother Bran gets to learn to swing a sword and shoot an arrow, but I’m not even allowed to watch anymore! He has to sneak out and show me what he learned at night. I’m stuck learning needlepoint and manners!”

“Isn’t that the sort of thing you need to learn to be a lady?”

Arya makes a face. 

“If that’s all being a lady is, then I don’t want to be one.”

The boy snorts, 

“Well you’re halfway there, sneaking around in a dirty cellar, dressed as a stable boy and sneaking food to a bastard blacksmith who’s kept hiding like a naughty dog.”

Arya frowns. 

“You said that the queen saw Jon Arryn bringing you here and she was the one who makes you stay down here?”

He nods. 

Arya did not like the queen. She didn’t like the way she fawned over Joffrey. She didn’t like how her face always looked like she was smelling something bad. And she really didn’t like how she had insisted that all the children’s direwolves be confined to the Godswood, just because Summer had tracked mud in one day. 

But keeping a boy down in the cellars, hidden from nearly everyone…

“I should tell my father you’re down here,” Arya tells him with a firm voice. 

“No!” he tells her standing up suddenly, his voice loud and firm. It surprises her, but does not frighten her, even with his size. Arya must have stiffened though, because his voice softens before he continues.

“I don’t think you should tell. The queen, when she saw me, she was...I’ve never seen someone so angry. “

Arya purses her lips, 

“The queen doesn’t scare me.”

“She should. She scares me. I’d almost thought she’d have done something...worse to me if Jon Arryn hadn’t been there.”

“My father will protect you, he’s not scared of the queen.”

The boy’s face goes white. 

“He should be too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out she had something to do with how Jon Arryn died, especially since no one’s bringing me food anymore.”

Arya feels her chest go cold, the thought of losing her father a shock. She also feels anger, at the queen’s hypothetical role in Arryn’s death. And, a rush of pity, for how scared the boy seems to be. 

But Arya is nothing if not defiant. 

“Well someone’s going to need to bring you food again. You’ll get sick trying to do smith work on one meal a day.”

An idea sprouts in her mind. 

“I could find a basket and start sneaking you things every few days. I’ve been down these cellars like four times and no one’s caught me!”

She expects him to push back, to tell her it’s too dangerous, or inappropriate. She doesn’t expect him to say what he does next. 

“You would go out of your way to do that for a bastard blacksmith you just met?”

Arya blinks. 

“Why wouldn’t I? I don’t want you to starve.”

The look on his face does its best to make her mad again. 

“Just don’t get in trouble on my account.”

Arya rolls her eyes, 

“I’m always in trouble anyway.”

She turns to run back up around the cellar stairs when she freezes, 

“You still never told me your name!”

He looks up at her. 

“Gendry Waters.”

“I’m Arya,” she half whispers while partially up the steps. 

“You told me that already.”

“I know, but I wanted to make sure you would remember.”

She takes another step and turns back, 

“And so you can quit calling me ‘milady.’”

Arya bounces up the cellar steps and back into the normal world of the Red Keep. 

Before supper, she searches through her trunks trying to find the little cloth basket she had used on the road to gather nuts and berries. She tucks it into the top of her boot, and changes back into the old woolen dress she’s supposed to be wearing so that the skirt will hide it. 

During supper, she keeps surveying the table for things she could nick and slip inside. The turnips in gravy were an obvious no go. The duck had a dry, crispy coating, but she didn’t think she could get a whole leg to herself without anyone noticing. She settles for a pair of bread rolls for this time. 

She’s just dropped one into her lap when Ned says, 

“It’s good to see you feeling better Arya, your dancing master was concerned.”

“What? Oh yeah, it was strange. I just came back up here and laid down for a few minutes, I’m fine now.”

Her mother reaches out and lays her hand across Arya’s forehead. 

“You feel fine now, you must have tired yourself with all the excitement this week.”

Excitement, Arya thinks, that’s a good way of putting it. 

In one swift movement, she slips the roll into the basket. 

After supper, Bran quietly asks her if she wants to go to the Godswood. 

“I told Mother I wanted to see Summer. We’ll stick to that if we get caught.”

Arya nods. 

“Go first, I’ll come down in a few minutes.”

Instead, she leaves right behind him, dashing up corridors and down steps on little cat feet. Maybe it was good practice, she thought, though she can’t imagine Syrio had this in mind. 

She slips into the cellars, just as dark now as they were in the day, and leaves the basket perched behind the box that Gendry had shown her earlier. She doesn’t see him, he must be sleeping if he has to wake so early. 

She hopes the rolls make a decent breakfast. 

She looks back over her shoulder as she leaves, wishing she could have said something when she left the basket. His eyes had looked so lonely. 

Arya is two and ten when she decides that maybe the ghost could be a friend.


	2. Chapter 2

Arya’s half past two and ten when her and Gendry start pestering each other with questions. 

“Did all your siblings come move here with you?”

Arya’s snuck down with the book she was supposed to be reading in lessons. If she’s going to have to read it, she might as well not do it in the stuffy solar.

“No. My oldest brother Robb is the acting Lord of Winterfell still. And Rickon’s only six, he was too young to come. And Jon went to the Wall.”

She doesn’t mention this time how strange it is to think that her oldest brother, who used to carry her over his shoulders, was now the lord of anything. Or how strange it was to think that even if she escaped this place and ran back to Winterfell, that Jon wouldn’t be there. 

Gendry looks surprised at that. 

“He went there voluntarily? Or did he do something bad and they made him?”

Arya feels her insides boil with rage. 

“He didn’t do anything! Everyone just convinced him he wanted to leave ‘cause he’s a bastard and mother didn’t like having him around.”

He looked cowed at her tone, and she feels bad for a moment, remembering that Gendry was a bastard himself. 

“It’s just me and Bran and Sansa who had to come. Sansa’s supposed to marry the stupid prince, and we got dragged behind.”

Sansa would marry stupid Joffrey and forget all about her. And Bran was hoping to squire for one of the knights in the king’s courts, they were supposedly the best in all Westeros. She could never do that, of course. 

“What about you?”

Arya was confused. 

“There are two princes. Are you marrying the other?”

Arya threw her basket at him. She’d brought him some sausages this time. Sausages were good, cheese was better. Anything that wouldn’t go bad before he could eat it, or attract pests. She’d brought him an apricot tart once, and he’d eaten the whole thing in two bites, before admitting he was still hungry afterwards.

She’s not really sure why she’s so comfortable talking to him. Maybe it’s because she knows he won’t tell on her for her unladylike behavior. Not that she really thinks he would, even if he didn’t live in a cellar. She doesn’t think too much about it though. She’s always been happy to make friends anywhere, Arya Underfoot she was truly. And he trusted her not to tell that he was living here, so that makes her feel worthy. 

“What did Jon Arryn ask you all about?” She asks him on another day.

Gendry puts down his stick. She’s started sneaking wooden sticks down here to use as practice swords. She can’t get down all the time, but she can usually squeeze in an hour before supper, before he has to go to sleep. She’s not entirely sure why, but she enjoys his time far more than most of the rest of the keep.

Arya had found out that though he could make a sword, he could barely swing one she’d been outraged. They can’t go full strength, because of the noise, but she can show him the forms Syrio has taught her, and the one’s she’s copied from Bran. He refuses to stand sideface properly.

He makes a face. 

“Just some stuff about my mum.”

Arya thinks before asking again. 

“Do you remember your mum?”

“Not much,” he admits, “I remember she had yellow hair and she used to sing to me. She died when I was little, I told Jon Arryn as much. It was enough apparently, because after that was when he dragged me off.”

Arya bites her lip. She can’t imagine not remembering her mother. As much as her and Catelyn do not see eye to eye, Arya always knew her mother loved her. She never had even a tiny thought that she might not always be there. 

“Did she ever tell you anything about your father?”

Gendry shakes his head. 

“She cursed him a few times, and I suppose I must look like him, but she would never tell me anything about him. I’m hardly the only one. King’s Landing is littered with the fruit of men who couldn’t keep it in their pants.”

Arya can’t imagine her life without her father. She longed so much to be just like him, for the Stark’s men to look at her as they did him. And she chafes at Gendry’s description of bastards, until she thinks about how Jon must feel. Jon never knew his mother, and he was an incredibly rare bastard who had been embraced by his father instead of cast off.

Gendry abruptly changes the subject by asking, 

“When did you learn to use a sword?”

Arya perks up. 

“I’ve been finding sticks and trying to hit Bran and Rickon with them for years. I used to play with the village children then too. I’ve got a real sword now too!” she brags.

Gendry snorts, 

“Who’s going to give a skinny little girl like you a real sword?”

Arya huffs at a few things in that sentence. 

“Jon did. Before he left for the wall, he had Mikken, that was the blacksmith at Winterfell, make me one. I named it Needle.”

He pauses a long time, before asking, 

“Can I see it?”

She probably should have expected that. He’s a blacksmith after all, he knew swords. 

She thinks about it for a moment. Septa Mordane had let both her and Sansa out of lessons early that day, pleading a headache. She has plenty of time…

After walking quietly through a hall and a stairway, Arya proceeds to skipping. It’s lighter on the feet than walking and less noisy than running.

Up the stairs, around the back, she can climb over a railing and come around the back, less a chance of being seen. 

She keeps Needle under her bed wrapped in cloth, all she has to do is slip it out…

“Arya,” she hears behind her and jumps out of her skin. 

Catelyn stands behind her, with a gaze that is not quite accusing. 

“Septa Mordane let us go early,” Arya insists.

Catelyn sits down on the end of Arya’s bed.

“And yet you’re back here in our chambers all by yourself.”

Arya’s taken aback by that. She has come to expect scolding from her mother. Scolding that anything she did was wrong, whether she was doing it the wrong way, or it was the wrong thing, or even just Sansa was doing it better. 

Catelyn reaches out to touch the fabric of the coverlet. It’s a rich velvet, embroidered. It’s a pale imitation, Arya thinks, to the genuine furs she had at Winterfell.

“You’re not happy here,” Catelyn comments. Arya looks at her mother. She imagines her opinion on King’s Landing was obvious, but it still felt strange to hear it voiced. 

“It’s sweaty, and crowded, and it stinks,” she tells her. 

Catelyn nods, a wry smile on her face. 

“It is one of the largest cities in Westeros. That many people in one place is never pleasant.”

She reaches out and touches Arya’s hair affectionately. Arya feels a rush of sadness. It reminds her of how Jon would muss her hair. She uses her foot to gently push the small sword back under her bed. 

“And Sansa’s always off with Myrcella or Joffrey,” she spits a bit despite herself at the second name, “And Bran’s always in some lesson that I’m not supposed to go to, so I never see him either. I’m just all by myself.”

Catelyn’s expression turns more overtly sympathetic, along with a touch of something Arya can’t quite place.

“It is rather easy to get lost in a household like this,” she admits, “I’m going to talk to the Septa tomorrow. Queen Cersei is a very busy woman, and she has trusted many of the duties of running the royal household to me. You’re three and ten now, I think it would be good if you accompanied me in the afternoon to learn these things. It’s the less glamorous side of the job…” her voice quiets, “The side that has never really appealed to Sansa.”

Arya’s bolstered a bit by this. 

Catelyn puts an arm around her shoulders and squeezes it. 

“Now what were you going to be doing with the rest of your day?”

Thinking quickly, Arya reaches for the book on the early days of the Targaryens on the end of her bed. 

“I was supposed to read this last week,” she admits. 

“Well go and do it now, find a quiet place.” Catelyn tells her sternly, “The septa will never allow what I requested if you’re behind on your lessons.”

Arya nods. As soon as Catelyn leaves the room, Arya slips the sword out from under her bed and scampers off with both it and the book.

It’s when she re-enters the cellars that Arya realizes that if she’s off with her mother in the afternoons, she won’t be able to see Gendry, or bring him his food, nearly as often.

She’ll find a way.

He’s sitting on his cot again when she reaches the cellar.

“I thought maybe you got caught,” he says slowly. His eyes are odd, Arya thinks. They almost look afraid. 

“Me? Never,” she tells him, but her voice is thin. Hoping to distract them both, she pulls Needle from it’s cloth. 

He turns the blade over in his hands, looking closely in the low light. 

“You can tell this was made for you, it’s so tiny,” he starts, swatting her with his other hand. “It’s proper castle forged steel though.”

“Won’t take a man’s head off, but it will poke him full of holes,” she tells him proudly. 

“Have you ever had to use it?”

She deflates. 

“No. Sort of glad of that. Syrio makes us use wooden swords, probably at my father’s insistence, after he caught me with it. I practice with it sometimes alone before bed though.”

He looks at her with a hint of a smile, while he gently touches the steel. 

“You’re lucky. Most lord fathers wouldn’t allow their daughters to play with swords at all, wooden or not, much less hire a teacher so she would learn properly.”

Ned understands her, Arya knows. He always has, even when her own mother couldn’t grasp the wolf-blood within her youngest daughter. 

Gendry’s got a funny look on his face. Of course, she thought. He didn’t know his father, he didn’t know what sort of a man he was. Whether he would be the kind of father to indulge an unusual interest, or an indifferent brute like King Robert was to his children.

“Wouldn’t leave the keep with this,” he says, “It’ll get stolen straight out of your hands.”

Arya frowns. 

“I never get to leave the keep anyway, at least not by myself,” she admits. “I wouldn’t know where to go and I don’t have any money of my own.”

She’d thought about it before, sneaking out and buying some proper bread or something that she didn’t have to filch for him and would last more than a day or two, but she doesn’t even have a copper, and if she asked for any, they would ask what it was for.

Gendry looks up at her from where he’s sitting on the end of his mattress. 

“S’not that great anyway,” he tells her, “Everyone’s stuffed in like cattle, you can’t hardly breathe.”

He still looks sad, Arya thinks. He grew up in King’s Landing, shouldn’t he miss it at least a little?

He gives her back the sword. 

“It’s good work, I’d like to be that good someday.”

Arya sits next to him. 

“You’re apprenticing in a castle though. Stuffed in a cellar or not, that must count for something. You’ll escape someday, and probably be able to smith anywhere. Maybe once we finally get to leave, I’ll steal you out of here and smuggle you back to Winterfell.”

His eyes at this point are hard to read. 

“Is it nice there? Nicer than here at least.”

“Well first off, not much isn’t. But Winterfell’s the best place I’ve been…”

She starts rambling at this point, explaining all of Winterfell’s best attributes, even though he looks very bored by the end. She’s glad he listens. 

This continues until she’s forced to jump up and realizes she’ll be late to supper. Before she leaves, she’s met by the urge to lean over and hug him. He looks like he needs it, so she pushes her forehead against one shoulder and does just that. His shoulders are so broad that her arms don’t quite make it all the way around. He’s nice to hug though, solid. 

She scampers off and doesn’t get to see the confused look on his face.

During supper, she worries. She’s been invited to go riding with Myrcella in the morning, and she’s supposed to meet with her mother after dinner. She’s scrounged up a roll and a slice of boar to slip, but she might not get the chance now. 

It’s on her mind enough that she lays awake in her little bed thinking. Unable to sleep, she finds a piece of paper and writes him a note. She slips the note into the basket. 

She steps out of bed carefully. The apartments in the tower of the hand are quite large, but Arya still does not want the sound of her feet to carry. The door manages not to squeak. 

She slips behind the guard at the bottom of the corridor easily enough. Too easily really. She runs on tiptoes, weaving in and out, behind columns and statues. Tonight, it's like she's the ghost. The keep is different at night, she thinks. The heat isn’t quite as bad, and the whole place is bathed in torchlight, making the red and gold accents seem to glow. 

The cellars are quite dark, but Arya’s been down here enough she could make the whole walk with her eyes closed. She counts, and finds the nook between the boxes where she’s left the basket before. She pauses for a moment, straining her ears.

She thinks that if she listens closely enough then, she can hear him. Gendry’s told her he goes to bed when most of the keep has supper, so that he can get up early enough to get to the forge unseen, before the sun. He would be sleeping now, she reasons. Did he snore? Or would she just hear the rhythmic sound of his breathing? The thought of him sleeping on his mattress alone in the same room as her makes her feel funny, so she shakes herself out of the spell, checks to make sure the basket was in the right spot, and races off back to bed before she’s noticed out of bed. 

The next morning, she leaves for the stables to meet with Myrcella. They’re saddling the horses when she asks, 

“How come you invited me instead of Sansa?”

Myrcella looks at her oddly, 

“Sansa doesn’t really like riding, you do. Besides, if I invited her, I would have had to invite Joffrey too.”

She makes a face while saying this, and Arya suddenly wonders. 

“Do you not like your brother?” 

It’s a foreign thought. As much as Arya despises Joffrey, she loves her own brothers so much that the thought of hating a sibling is bizarre to her. She doesn’t even hate Sansa, not truly. 

“No! He’s awful. He’s mean to me and Tommen and Mother doesn’t care because he’s the oldest. So I just avoid him as much as I can. It’s the civilized thing to do. Soon I’ll be betrothed to someone, and I can leave, and go far away and I won’t ever have to interact with him day to day again.”

Her candor shocks Arya. 

“You know Sansa’s going to marry him-”

“Oh Sansa will figure it out soon enough,” Myrcella tells her grimly, “He’s put on his most perfect prince face with her. Mother taught him that well. He’ll break eventually, and she’ll see. She was with me the other day when he was berating a servant because he forgot to call him ‘your grace’.”

The subject is changed when Mycella notices her horse has thrown a shoe. 

“We’ll go by the forge and get you a replacement real quick, Lilybloom,” she tells the pale brown mare below, before nodding to one of the guards. 

Arya feels her chest tighten. 

She stays outside the forge while Mycella talks to one of the apprentices to get a new shoe. It’s an open aired building, as much as possible, only with enough of a roof to funnel the smoke. It’s hot, hotter even then the rest of King’s Landing, and the sound of hammers hitting steel rings out through the air. 

Arya searches the scene. She thinks she’s early enough, but isn’t sure…

There he is, off in a corner. He’s taking a sheet of something out of the fire, glowing red, before setting it against the anvil and pounding it. 

She’s never seen him in sunlight before. His black hair is falling into his eyes, and even from this far, Arya can see his muscles straining. He’s strong, she thinks, and he’s good at this. This is his element, where he belongs. 

And it sticks in her mind of why on earth the Queen wanted to keep a simple blacksmith trapped in a cellar. 

She doesn’t get to look long before Myrcella returns, with Lilybloom re-shoed and ready to go. 

It’s two and a half days until Arya can sneak away to see him again. She realizes at dinnertime that it’s the one day a week that Catelyn takes the afternoon off to go and pray in the sept. Realizing this, she pockets her entire meat pasty, makes a hasty excuse about wanting to go to the Godswood and visit Nymeria, and runs off. 

Her feet pound into the ground like this when she runs, she’s not trying to be sneaky at all. She hopes no one follows her. 

“I’m so sorry, I haven’t been able to get away for days,” she tells him hurredly, thrusting the pasty, crust only a little crumbled, into his hands. 

His eyes look at her, guarded, even as he tears into the pasty. His voice is sulky.

“I thought you’d suddenly decided not to hang around cellars with bastards anymore.”

The rage raises itself in Arya’s gut. 

“Of course not! I even left a note to tell you I probably wouldn’t be here for a few days-”

Gendry suddenly ducks his head, abashed.

“I couldn’t read most of that note.”

Arya’s words are stolen from her. Of course, she knew most of the smallfolk couldn’t read or write, but…

“You don’t even know your letters?” 

Craftsmen were in a bit of a special position. Smiths did a lot of business, for customers of all classes, and would have to read contracts and bills of sale…

“I can do my letters and I know enough to get by in business, but that’s really it. And I can’t imagine the Queen would much like me getting anywhere above my station.”

Arya grits her teeth. The queen again. 

“Well, we’ll just have to make you practice,” she tells him, “Bring me the note, we’ll go over it before I have to leave. Worst case, we anger the queen a little more than she already is, best case, you’ll have a better chance once I help you escape here and start up your own shop.”

He fishes around to where he’s hidden the basket by his trunk. And then, he stops, and hugs her loosely like she had done last time. 

“What was that for?”

He bites his lip. 

“Sorry- it’s just…I don’t much like people. The other boys in the forge treat me like a jumped up bastard, and even the Master is cold, likely avoid the Queen’s ire. I don’t think I realized how lonely I was getting.”

Warmth fills Arya up to the toes of her feet.

It’s at three and ten that Arya decides Gendry’s her very best friend.


	3. Chapter 3

The two of them learn quite a lot when Arya’s three and ten. 

The reading lessons are less difficult that Arya had expected. She knew she did not have the makings of a good teacher at all, but she still pushes on. Gendry knows all of the letters and sounds, teaching him to string them together and break apart new words isn’t as hard as those would have been.

Following her mother around in the afternoons, however, is incredibly educational. 

Arya never realized there were three kitchens in the Red Keep. There was the one below the Little Gallery, closest to the Tower of the hand. This was where her and her family’s meals were prepared. There were the regular kitchens, near the Grand Hall, and there was another, smaller one, next to the council chambers. 

This one wasn’t used often, and Arya discovered, was often completely empty, even in the middle of the day. There wasn’t a whole lot to seek from within it, but she’s filched a whole wheel of cheese once, and a loaf of oat bread. She also learns, that most of the staff in the kitchens below the Little Gallery, leave for the main one around suppertime, and it’s much easier to sneak into, especially if you were a child likely eager for her supper. 

And Arya does enjoy this part of being a lady anyhow, it turns out. Learning how to check stores and levels, and where to make orders and who to send them with. She wishes she didn’t have to wear a dress to do it, but she wouldn’t mind being a lady that even a scullery maid wouldn’t fear telling that she needed a new bucket. 

Which was more than she could say for Queen Cersei. 

The small glimpses she gets of the queen, the most Arya understands Gendry’s fear of her, and maybe how Joffrey ended up how he has. One day, her and Catelyn come upon the queen berating one of the new kitchen girls, a skittish thing with curly hair and a soft voice. Even when the queen leaves, Arya and Catelyn have to console her before she can get back to her work, and she won't speak of what Cersei was talking about. Somehow both dismissive of her duties and domineering to those under her, Arya decides quickly that she never wants to end up like Cersei. 

It’s one day, randomly, during her forced participation in a tea for the practice of etiquette, Arya finally asks Sansa, 

“Why on earth do you admire Queen Cersei so much?”

Sansa looks at Arya like she’s lost her mind, 

“She’s the queen Arya, she’s the most powerful woman in Westeros. And someday, I will have her place, so I need to learn from her.”

But she was doing such a poor job, Arya thought. Most of the servants working in the castle greeted her with more familiarity than they did the queen, and Catelyn tutted over many of the ledgers, saying that upkeep had clearly been neglected. Even Cersei’s ladies-in-waiting seemed to be following in her footsteps, and letting these go by the wayside. Even if it was horseshit that the queen’s power was limited to these matters, they still needed doing. 

“You’ll be Joffrey’s queen someday,” Arya agrees though. Sansa had flowered some six moons ago, and the wedding had become to loom in the future as a foregone conclusion, rather than a hazy possibility. If Sansa was queen, Arya thought, she could let Gendry out of his cellar. But would she? Maybe Arya should try to butter her up a bit.

“What’s what you’ve always wanted, to be queen and live here in the south. Ever since you met him, you wanted to be Joffrey’s queen,” she tries to keep the disdain out of her voice. 

And she swears she sees Sansa wince a bit. 

Arya’s lessons with Syrio are becoming more and more self-directed. She wonders sometimes if her father knew what sort of lessons she was going to get from him.

“It’s not that chasing cats and walking on my hands out by the stables isn’t fun,” she explains to Gendry, “But I don’t understand how it’s going to teach me to swordfight.”

“It almost sounds like he’s teaching you to sneak up and stab people in the back. Though-” Gendry sneaks a hand around and yanks one of her braids, 

“Given your size that’s not a bad idea.”

Arya looks him up and down a bit. He’s big, both taller and broader than her. She wonders if she could…

“Stand up,” she tells him. “I bet I could teach even a big bull like you to be light on your feet.”

It’s far more of a struggle than teaching him to read. The fact that he pays attention at all is a testament to their friendship. He had told her that the other apprentices in Flea Bottom had called him the Bull because of his size, and that he’d even made himself a helm shaped like a bull’s head for practice.

“Do you still have it?” Arya asks. 

Gendry shakes his head. He hadn’t had time to grab it before Jon Arryn dragged him away. It’s too bad, Arya would have liked to see it. She’s never seen a battle helm someone’s made just for themselves.

But cattle can swim, so she supposes even a bull could learn to water dance.

She manages to get him to stand on his hands against one wall when he finally asks, 

“Why on earth are you teaching me this?”

Arya’s thoughtful. 

“If I can teach you to be as quiet and sneaky as I can be, maybe you can leave here more. At least to get your own food. Really become a ghost of this place- I could sneak you a bedsheet! Or I could go into the kitchens and cover you in flour!”

Gendry raises an eyebrow. Okay, maybe the bedsheet idea is stupid. But she’s thought about the idea a lot recently. Being able to move about the Red Keep completely unseen. Her rounds with Catelyn have made her familiar with the official hallways, she wants to find all the hidden passages.

Looking Gendry up and down, she thinks that walking on stairways quietly will come next. The stairs in the Red Keep are exhausting, going up and down between different areas that really ought not be on different levels at all. 

She works on her stealth a bit that day, leaving to return to the tower of the hand for dinner. 

The path between the kitchens and the tower goes past the Godswood along a narrow hallway, before the steps begin to wind downward. Arya decides it would be a good day to stop and see Nymeria. 

The other few times that Arya’s visited her direwolf, she’d been lolling in the sun, or playing tug-of-war with Summer, but this time is different. 

Nymeria’s back on her haunches, her ears pointed back and her teeth gritted. Nymeria’s always been wilder than her brothers and sisters, but Arya’s never felt ill at ease approaching her before. 

Nymeria pays her no attention through, so Arya crouches to the grass in order to see what the wolf sees.

She does not expect Sansa. She definitely does not expect her to be sitting on the ground beneath the heart tree, Lady’s head in her lap, quietly sobbing.

If asked, Arya would say Sansa cried far too much, at the drop of a hat in fact. But not like this. Sansa’s tears were pretty, made to make her look the appropriate degree of sad, or loud, to draw attention to whatever was upsetting her. 

These sounded like they were hurting her, and it was taking all her energy to try and keep them in.

In her distress, Arya steps too hard onto a twig. 

Sansa’s sobs choke back in her throat, and she jerks her head back roughly.

“Go away Arya.”

Arya ignores her. Sansa must be used to that. She sits down right next to her on the grass. 

“What did he do?”

Sansa looks like she wants to start crying again, like she wants to shove Arya away and run. But she doesn’t. She heaves one more sob, drops her head on Arya’s shoulder and spills the whole story. 

She had been leaving the tower to have tea in the garden earlier, when she’d bumped into Prince Tommen, who was crying and clutching something in his hands.

Sansa describes how her stomach had lurched, threatening to empty itself, when she’d realized what Tommen was holding was one of the many cats who kept pests from the Red Keep; it’s belly had been cut open. 

“She was going to have babies,” Tommen had told her, tears spilling from his eyes, “And Joffrey cut her open anyway. Just because he could, and he knew it would make me sad.”

Arya can’t hide her horror. 

“We have to tell-”

Sansa grabs her arm. 

“We can’t. Tommen told me Joffrey’s been threatening to do this for a long time, and Cersei’s never done a thing to stop him.”

Of course she wouldn’t, Arya thought, her eldest son could clearly do nothing wrong in her eyes. Even something so despicable. 

“Not the Queen,” Arya interrupts, “Father. He can’t be alright with you be-being betrothed to someone like that.”

Sansa stays frozen on the ground, and Arya has another creeping thought sneak into the back of her mind.

“Sansa,” she starts slowly, “What if he wants to do things like that to people?”

Sansa nods, her eyes still wide open, but she doesn’t move. 

“Fine,” Arya says after a moment, “I’ll tell him. You stay here.”

As she turns her back, she hears Sansa murmuring to herself. Something about how if she managed to act perfect, he would be perfect in return. Arya shakes her head. 

As she races to wait by the council chambers, Arya’s mind races too. How could the king and queen be so blind to their older son’s behavior? To one of their other children no less! Ned and Catelyn never stood for Arya and Sansa’s bickering. She thinks of Maeger’s Holdfast, the castle-within-a-castle where the royal family slept. 

Oh how she longed to find a way in there, past the twelve inch thick walls and spike-bottomed moat. She could come up with far worse punishments for Joffrey than sheep shit in his bed. 

When she reaches the small councilroom, the guard at the door tells her that the session cannot be interrupted. Despite the urge to insist that this was urgent, Arya simply stands to one side and bounces from foot to foot. Ever since her fourteenth name day, Catelyn has despaired over her daughter’s still seemingly boundless energy making her fidget. Rather than be resigned though, Catelyn often seemed to envy it. 

While she waits, Arya’s mind wanders again to Gendry. She wonders if Cersei had thought of him the way Joffrey had that cat. Something to hurt just because she could. 

She frowns though. That didn’t explain the altercation Gendry had described between Queen Cersei and Jon Arryn. 

This is what she’s turning over in her mind when the small council chamber doors open and the members walk out one by one. 

Before her father, Arya catches a glimpse of King Robert. She hasn’t really seen much of him, except at feasts and events. Usually with a goblet of wine in one hand and the other down the bodice or around the backside of some poor serving girl. 

Arya makes a face thinking of it. She found the king’s behavior almost as repugnent as she did Sansa’s gushing rambling about Joffrey kissng her. Arya supposed kissing must be nice enough if everyone seemed to want to do it, but seven hells it was boring to listen to other people talk about.

Arya wrinkles her nose. Looking at King Robert, even just the side of his face as he lumbers away with the other council members...She can’t fight a strange feeling his face evokes.

But then Ned emerges, a put upon expression on his face, and Arya’s train of thought is derailed. 

Thankfully, Ned finds a quiet spot to sit and listens to his daughter’s story. 

When she finishes, Ned puts his head in his hands. 

“This makes things even more difficult.”

Arya feels a flash of anger, 

“Difficult? Father you can’t let Sansa marry someone like that!”

Ned breathes in deeply. 

“Arya,” he explains, “We cannot break a betrothal to the crown prince. Not without it seeming like an insult to the whole royal family and gaining a country’s worth of enemies in the process.”

Arya’s stomach twists at his words. Ned has reached out and put his hands on both her shoulders and for one of the few times in her life, she feels the urge to pull away from his touch. 

“The wedding is still a year or two away. That’s a year or two I can use to try much more forcefully to impact our prince’s behavior. I feel his uncle might be an asset in this. He has been openly critical of his behavior before, and he doesn’t seem to fear reproach for it.”

Every inch of Arya wants to object, loudly. But she just nods. 

Before returning to the tower to have dinner, she stops outside Maegor’s Holdfast and stares at it. Hide yourselves behind the walls, she thinks. Every king and queen must have assumed that walls would protect them. That’s why so many acted as though they could do whatever they wanted. 

The next time Arya manages to see Gendry, she relays him the whole story, growing red and incensed all over again upon retelling. 

“I can’t believe they’re still going to make her marry him after all that.”

Gendry inhales roughly, and chews on his lips before responding. 

“I never really thought about the fact that most marriages among highborns were arranged. It must be awful.”

“Marriage is one of the oldest and best ways to forge a beneficial alliance,” Arya quotes in her best imitation of her septa, “My parents grew to love each other, but they married as strangers. Imagine marrying someone you’ve never met and then finding out they like to cut cats open.”

“Not all smallfolk get to marry for love,” Gendry comments slowly, “Sometimes it’s just convienence, or because you need to survive. But I’ve never heard it be for the good of someone other than you.”

Sansa had thought she wanted to marry Joffrey the minute she met him. She thought he was perfect, and that even though the betrothal had been arranged by their fathers, she thought she would get true love as part of the deal too.

Arya frowns and looks at Gendry, gets a real good look at him, even in the low light. He’s tall and strong, and quite handsome too, Arya thinks, though her brain feels like it’s missed a step on a staircase when she first thinks it. She ignores the niggling feeling probing at the back of her mind at his features too.

“Did you have a girl back in Flea Bottom? Someone you thought you might marry?”

Gendry snorts. 

“Hells no, I’m shit at talking to girls. And it’s not as though they flock around grouchy blacksmiths without a name or a family.” 

Arya understands the first bit. The last time they’d had to all get dressed up and join a royal feast, Bran had confessed to her that he found pretty much all of the girls at court completely terrifying. But still...

“You don’t have trouble talking to me, and I’m a girl.” 

It’s strange, Arya’s never felt defensive of her femininity before. 

Gendry snorts again, 

“You’re not a girl.”

“Then what am I?” 

“An Arya.”

She doesn’t know what to make of this conversation, any of it. So when Gendry changes the subject, she lets him.

“Sometimes a cat or two will wander down here, hunting for mice,” Gendry comments, “A couple of them let me pet them.”

Arya frowns. 

“I never see them when I come down here.”

Gendry stands. 

“I think there’s more than one way to this spot. You come around from the left, the cats I see crawls over those boxes off to the right.”

Arya follows his lead. She’s never paid any attention to the boxes full of jars of pickles to the right, they’re stacked too high to her to climb over easily. Maybe she should have brought Bran down here. 

Gendry gives her a boost, and she pulls herself onto the top box. The dust makes her nose itch as she crawls down onto the other side. It’s not very wide, big enough for a cat sure, but just barely enough for an Arya, but the passage continues behind the boxes, and Arya squeezes herself to find out where it goes.

It’s not even stone, just packed earth, but it’s not too far when the path splits. Arya takes the righthand path, squinting in the dark with only her tiny torch, and eventually encountering cold, black iron. 

The dungeons, she thinks. You can get from the cellar into the dungeons. She can at least, maybe not a full grown man. If the passages are this close together, she thinks, that must be why she found it so quickly after finding the dragon skulls.

Before she goes back, she decides to find out where the other fork leads. Pressed into from both sides by the packed earth, her feet eventually finds the steps of a staircase that curves and winds. 

When she reaches the top and finds a door, she opens it and is shocked to find herself in one of the solars in the tower of the hand. She turns back to look at the door. It’s behind a heavy curtain that lines nearly the whole wall with the window. It had been there the whole time, and they’d never realized. 

Hearing footsteps, Arya, as quietly as she can manage, steps backwards, closing the door in front of her and standing still before turning and scampering back down the steps to find the cellar again. 

When she returns, she doesn’t have long to excitedly spill the newfound secret to Gendry. 

“I could sneak down here in the middle of the night if I needed to! No one would see me at all!”

Even in the low light, she can see Gendry turn bright red and sputter. She ignores him completely, she doesn’t understand him sometimes. 

The older she gets, the less she seems to understand. 

It’s two moons before she turns fifteen when Arya flowers. The rest of her family respects her desire to keep things quiet, but she still gets a hug from her mother after the (unncessary, really) talk that followed with the assurance, that ‘she was a woman now’.

She doesn’t feel like one. Even with a glance in the looking glass, she stil looks like her younger self. Taller, a bit, rounder, a little bit. The year before, Bran had shot up like a tree and sparring with him was now completely different. Sansa had been tall for years, graceful and pretty. But Arya still felt overwhelmingly like the same old Arya. 

Catelyn insists that she “dress properly” when she attends to her duties with her. This means that she wears dresses far more than she would voluntarily, but they’re plain wool and linen ones, not fancy ones like Sansa favored that screamed “woman” and she doesn’t feel any more grown than when she wore her leathers.

The only time Arya begins to feel like her age might be catching up to her is when she lays in bed at night. Some nights she tosses and turns, and can’t get things out of her mind. Her mind lingers on Sansa and Joffrey, and Gendry. 

And every once in a while, she’ll step out of bed in just her shift, slip her feet into her boots and leave. The nights she does this, her skin itches with something she can’t name. 

Once she pushed aside the curtain and carefully climbed down the staircase holding a candle. She found the fork where the passage split between the dungeons and the cellars and just stands, contemplative. 

Other times, she leaves the tower proper and walks the halls. Some nights she goes to the Godswood, unguarded as per usual. No one in this keep kept the Old Gods but them. She sits in the grass and climbs the low tree branches, and gazes up at the moon and stars and pleas to the Gods to help her understand the strangeness of the skin she’s in. 

Some nights, she will find the entrance to the cellar and sit beside it. She thinks of going down, of finding Gendry in the dark. She imagines reaching for his hands silently, and pulling him beside her. She imagines holding tight to him as they would each step softly and move through the keep as she had taught him, finding spots shrouded in darkness where no one would find them. How they would find places to slip away together, in which no one else would ever find them.

A shiver runs down the back of Arya’s neck, and she wonders if he ever felt this queer need for something under his skin, the same as her. He was older than her, maybe he even knew what it was. 

One night she idly finds herself in the kitchens, the small, less used ones. She’s not really being guided by anything that night. She catches a glimpse of herself in one of the polished kettle. A small, pale figure in a white linen shift, holding a single candle. If anyone saw her, they might truly think her a ghost. 

Her reverie is broken by a loud sound, that makes her duck under a table and behind a cabinet door. The noise is the sound of feet, heavy plodding feet on the ground. 

“Barra,” she hears from a voice, a young sounding feminine voice. “Barra come on, we can’t be down here.”

“Wanna go mama,” a small child croaks, “s’dark up there.”

“You heard the queen,” a pair of feet appear, and the bottom of a shift much like Arya’s. More ghosts? “She says no ones to know you’re here. You have to stay in the rafters.”

It hits Arya. The voice belongs to one of the kitchen girls, the one Cersei had so thoroughly berated that time.

The figures come into Arya’s view again for a few seconds, and she finds the source of the initial noise. 

A young girl, no older than four, with pale skin, in a white shift. With a mop of curly black hair. 

Arya is still four and ten, if only just barely, and she comes to the conclusion that she understands very little.


	4. Chapter 4

Arya’s one day from being five and ten when she finally cracks.

After seeing the little girl at night, Arya starts tucking a piece of paper in her undershirt and seriously mapping out the bits of the keep she knows. The little girl must have come from one of the empty chambers above the small kitchen. How many other hiding places could there be?

It turns out, according to her eyes, lots. Even dismissing the regular servants quarters above the kitchens, and the stables, and the armory, the twisting stairways and levels made it difficult to truly map out the keep completely. 

That was also excluding the tunnels and passageways. The extra cellar that wasn’t supposed to be there might just be one of many.

Arya meets Myrcella for a ride one day, and swears she sees a very similar pair of blue eyes quietly mucking out a stall. 

It’s after a lesson with the Septa that it hits her. The subject had been some rather vague preparation for marriage and the duties thereof. Septa Mordane had made some mention of men having “urges” and that’s what Sansa and Arya are talking about. 

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Sansa had said, “if a man loved you enough to marry you, how could he look elsewhere?”

Arya shakes her head at Sansa’s romanticism. The two girls have become much more civil with each other since the incident in the Godswood, and they could now on occasion have talks like this. 

“I think women must have those urges too, or there wouldn’t be so many having bastard children. Yet somehow, we’re the ones crucified for it, but from men it’s practically expected.”

Sansa nods. She's sitting on a bench with her knees drawn up. Her chin is pressed into her chest, and she’s not looking in Arya’s direction.

“I heard queen Cersei saying the other day...she was ranting on about something, I don’t think she knew I could hear her...she was talking about how Robert was a maiden’s dream as a lad...and how he still manages to have his hands all over women even now. Said he probably has bastards all over the seven kingdoms.”

And Robert would never raise a bastard the way Ned had Jon, Arya thought.

“Do you think he even loves the queen at all?” Sansa asks, her voice nearly silent.

Arya grimaces, thinking of the King’s boorish behavior, and the Queen’s tightly restrained faces. 

“If he does, he does a damn good job at hiding it.”

Sansa has a thoughtful, faraway look in her eye.

“She must have loved him at one point. She was marrying the king after all…”

Arya winces, realizing Sansa is wondering if her future is going to be much like Cersei’s. She’s insisted that Joffrey’s acted the part of a perfect gentleman for her ever since the incident with the cat, and that he hasn’t earned Arya’s ire, but she still wishes she could teach him a lesson.

But it’s Sansa’s comment about bastards that has her thinking…

Arya thinks of the little she’s seen of King Robert. Of the little girl in the kitchen with the mop of black hair. Of the blue eyes she’d seen in the stables. Of that unnamed something she could see in Gendry’s face. 

Could they…

But if they were, Arya’s mind ponders, sticking, then why would they all be here? She thinks about what Gendry told her, that the queen had interrupted Jon Arryn… If Cersei...she could have sent them away even, she could never see them again. If she was bothered by Robert’s infidelity, why would she want reminders of it around constantly?

Arya feels a rush of sour taste in her mouth. She kept Gendry around, but she kept him in a cellar, away from people, out of the sunlight even.

And it’s with a rush that she realizes she should have told Ned ages ago. 

There’s no council meeting today, so Ned is just sitting in the big solar in the tower, going over papers. 

She shifts back and forth from one foot to the other, trying not to seem nervous. Ned raises an eyebrow. 

“Did you need something Arya?”

She bounces a bit, and fights to find her voice before admitting, “I need to show you something I found.”

Ned trails behind her path. He thinks she’s being strangely silent, and isn’t sure at all what might be awaiting him. 

When she steps into the entrance to the kitchen cellars, Ned turns and glances at the walls while she takes down a torch. 

“How did you even-”

Arya’s face turns guilty.

“Syrio had me try and chase and catch the castle cats for a lesson once. Lots of them run down here.”

She’s moving a couple of the boxes around, before turning back to Ned. 

“Stay back and let me-”

“Arya-” Ned tries to start, but finds himself faltering.

She disappears for a minute. 

Gendry’s sitting on his mattress, running through a letter she’d written him for practice. He doesn’t look surprised to see her, but looks alarmed when she grabs him by the hand and tugs him to his feet.

“Arya what are you-”

She swallows roughly, and reaches out to lay a hand on his collar. 

“Just trust me okay? Nothing bad will happen to you.”

When they step to the end of the cellar and Gendry sees the man seated on one of the crates, he can’t stop the panic that rises in the throat, and he begins to babble. 

Arya ignores this when she tells Ned. 

“This is Gendry. I think he’s one of King Robert’s...” her voice trails off.

Gendry stays standing, on edge, the entire time that Arya’s story spills from her lips.

When she's done, Ned just rubs his head with one hand. 

“Arya,” he finally interrupts, “what made you finally tell me this now?’”

Arya inhales deeply. 

“Because I saw a little girl in the kitchens who looks like him. And a girl working in the stables too. I think Cersei’s keeping them stashed away...and I don’t know why.”

Ned sighs. 

“Jon Arryn left some notes behind that I’ve been trying to decipher...this might make sense of some of them.”

Arya is secretly disappointed. Part of her had hoped that Ned would know right away what they needed to do. When she was younger her father always seemed to have the right answer. She takes a real strong look at her father, and for the first time, sees how tired he looks. He must see the worried look in her eyes, because he reaches out to ruffle her hair. 

“Don’t worry too much, I’ll figure something out.”

Her face is long as they leave the cellar. 

Arya heard Ned quietly ask,

"What do you do when you go see him?"

"We talk," Arya starts, "we play at swords with sticks some," it really does sound sort of childish put like that, "I've been helping him with his reading and writing. We're friends."

Ned looks at her and Arya can't name what he seems to be looking for in her face. He says, 

“Arya, I don’t want you going down there anymore.”

Her face transforms from sad to shocked, 

“Father, if I-”

Ned clutches her arm.

“I’ll keep bringing him food. You were right, if the queen is involved, then she likely means him harm. I won’t put you in that sort of danger, I want you far away.”

Arya opens her mouth, a thousand objections wanting to pour out, most of all, ‘but he’s my friend’. Her throat feels dry though, her chest squeezing itself tight, and nothing will come out. She stays silent, though she fears tears may break from the corners of her eyes. 

Ned looks close at his daughter, as confused by her response as she. 

“Arya,” he starts quietly, “How long have you been keeping him secret?”

Arya pauses for a long moment before answering. 

“Nearly three years.”

Ned falters, and Arya understands. She’s never been known as a child who could keep her mouth shut at all, about anything. He puts a hand on his shoulder affectionately. 

“I won’t let anything happen to either of you.”

That doesn’t stop the piercing pain that starts in Arya’s chest. She goes into her fifteenth name day feeling very down. It’s been a long time since she’s had to go more than a few days without seeing him, and all she can think about is wondering if he’s lonely. 

She can't even properly enjoy the gorgeous plum cake or the dark blue velvet and gray fur lined cloak presented as her gift. The cake tastes of ashes and even into autumn it's far too hot in King's Landing to wear the cloak. 

Her siblings seem to notice her mood, and after supper, Bran touches her arm so that they can slip away to the Godswood. 

“What’s on your mind?” he asks as they go at each other with the play swords. 

Arya sighs. She wishes she could tell him. Bran was always the one of their siblings with the most empathy, the most open-hearted of the Starks. He would understand. But she cannot tell, she said she wouldn’t. 

“I’m still thinking about Sansa, she gets so upset now every time her betrothal to Joffrey comes up.”

Bran makes a face, but it’s an angry one. 

“Has she told you anything specific? Anything since the bit with the cat?”

Arya thinks hard. Most of Sansa’s admissions to her have been about how unfocused and angry Cersei could get when she met with her, and a couple of comments about how much she seemed to be drinking. Nothing about Joffrey specifically. 

“Not really, no...have you?”

Seeing Bran angry is sort of strange, Arya thinks, but that’s all his clenched jaw reads. He's taller than her now, and Arya often finds herself still thinking of him as a child even though he's barely a year and a half younger than her. 

“He likes to hit the servants. He’s hit both Tommen and Myrcella too, well Myrcella less now that’s she’s gotten so good at avoiding him. One of these days he’s probably going to try and hit Sansa too.”

Arya’s blood boils. She remembers when she was younger, one of the maids came into work one morning with a black eye. Careful questioning had revealed her husband as the source and Ned had gone to have a little chat with the man, and it had never happened again. Catelyn had clutched Arya’s shoulder and told her quietly that a man should never strike his wife. 

She also recalls Sansa mentioning during a lesson that the Queen had told her that a king should never strike his queen, and the Septa had agreed, muttering about the behavior of a drunken brute. Arya hadn’t thought anything at the time, though it occurs to her now that the queen said nothing about striking the servants. 

“If he ever does,” she tells Bran with a glint in her eye, “We’ll steal her away. We’ll smuggle her out of here, send her back north. Fuck the consequences.”

Bran nods, and their conversation drifts to the tunnels out of the keep, and how they could be utilized. The moon is two days from full, and they stay out far too late, and get a tongue lashing when they return to the tower of the hand, blaming their absence on the wolves, of course. 

The next morning, Arya spends much of her lessons trying to write a letter. She’s on her way to deliver it after dinner, when Ned pulls her aside for a few minutes. He shuts the door to the solar behind them. 

Arya sits at his desk hesitantly, but there is no anger in Ned’s voice. 

“Tell me about the others you think you’ve seen.”

Arya scours her mind thinking of details. The girl in the stables was tall and strong looking. The little girl’s mother had reddish, curly hair. There’s not much. Once she’s done, she asks Ned. 

“Have you figured out any of Jon Arryn’s notes?’

Ned’s lips twist before he speaks. 

“He marked them with letters, ‘G, Mott, armorer,’ was the first. ‘M, Vale’, makes sense too. The girl in the stables must be Mya Stone. She was Robert’s first bastard, he fathered her when we were still being fostered there, before the rebellion. The last I heard she was running mule teams in the Vale, she would have been perfectly at home in the stables.”

Ned’s eyes grow sad. 

“When he became King, he spoke once about wanting to bring her here to court. Cersei forbade it of course.”

Yet, she is here now, Arya thinks. Did Jon Arryn bring her here too? But why, she was a bastard, and a girl at that. It’s not like she would have any sort of claim.

“There was one marked ‘B, Baelish’s establishment, very new,’ I think that must be the little girl you saw, she was the most recent one on the list.”

Ned’s jaw clenches, and Arya knows why. Despite her mother’s longtime friendship with the man, Ned did not like Petyr Baelish, or his establishments (which even Arya knew were brothels) in the least. She hopes he's not involved in this, she doesn't like being around him.

“There’s a few more I haven’t figured out, ‘L and S, pigs’, ‘Edric, see Renly’, ‘B, river’, but that one’s scratched out. Arya….” he trails off, “If you see or here anything odd, come to me. I’ve been able to figure these out, but nothing touches on what Cersei’s role in all of this is. Jon did keep writing something about ‘the seed is strong’, but I can’t make any sense of that.”

Arya chews her lip in thought. 

“When I thought I knew what I was looking for, they stuck out. All of them look a lot like Robert. Maybe that’s what he meant?”

Ned’s face changes, and Arya’s not sure why. He dismisses her without another word, and she leaves the tower lost in thought. 

She counts the steps three times before she finishes writing her letter. She slips into the cellar and leaves the letter in their usual place. 

The next night, once the rest of her family is asleep she dons her new cloak over her shift and boots before leaving the tower. She has to walk up the winding staircase that wraps around the tower, to the hallway that goes past the Godswood. She unlatches the gate before continuing down the hallway, ducking behind a column to wait for the gold cloaks to pass.

The moon is full, that’s what gave her the idea. She wrote her instructions up as neatly as possible. She raps her knuckles, hard, against the stone just inside the ceiling of the cellar. The sound echoes. That’s what she told him to listen for.

‘Check the path up the staircase for guards, climb and stand still. If there you hear anyone, wait. If you don’t hear footsteps, turn right, you have five minutes before the next rotation. Twelve steps across the hallway, the wall will open up to the Godswood. I’ll leave the gate ajar. Walk softly.”

She hopes she taught him how to walk softly enough. 

It’s not long, not more than a quarter of an hour after she reaches the wood, that she hears the soft creek of the gate and her heart leaps. 

She turns to see Gendry, dressed in the same clothes he wears during the day. She’s suddenly struck by the wandering thought that maybe he sleeps naked, but she chases that thought off like Nymeria would chase a rabbit. 

“Your father said he didn’t want you to see me anymore.”

“Uhh, he said he didn’t want me going down to the cellar anymore. I didn’t.”

Gendry’s eyes flick to where the gate is. It’s not exactly solid. 

“Should we keep our voices down?”

Arya smiles. 

“I think we’re fine, so long as we don’t start yelling. The gold cloaks don’t come down the hallway here much, and no one uses the Godswood but us. No one in the south keeps the old gods still.”

She tugs Gendry by the arm, and starts pointing out all the different kinds of trees. She points at the carved face in the oak acting as the heart tree, and the patch of red dragon’s breath growing beneath it. She leads him to the edge, where the wood ends and you can sit and see over the Blackwater Rush, even in the middle of the night with the moon as big as it is. She points to where Summer, Lady and Nymeria are sleeping in a pile. 

At some point, they find a random patch of dragon’s breath and stop just to sit and talk. 

“Your father brought me supper earlier. Said that he wasn’t sure what was going on still, but if he found anything out, he would tell me.”

Arya tries not to feel passed over. She likes to think Ned would tell her too, but she’s not sure anymore. 

Gendry laughs. 

“It’s so strange. Just a few days ago, I was a blacksmith with no name, now I find out I’m actually one of the King’s bastards and I’m being hidden away for some unknown reason.”

It is surreal, Arya agrees. They keep on talking for what feels like hours. Gendry doesn’t even seem upset that this is going to lose him sleep. Arya is struck by how much it hurt just not seeing him for even a few days. Laying eyes on him all she’d wanted to do was throw her arms around him and kiss him square on the….

Wait, 

Where had that come from?

But now that that thought has entered her brain, while they’re talking about anything else, it’s all Arya can think about it. Whatever else is the subject, her eyes keep drifting to his lips. 

At some lull in the conversation, she decides just to go for broke. 

“Have you ever kissed a girl?”

Gendry blinks. Whatever he had been expecting her to say next, that wasn’t it. 

“Back in Flea Bottom, a fishmonger’s daughter once came up to me when I was eating, tapped me on the shoulder. She kissed me straight on the mouth, and then ran back to her friends laughing. Still not sure what that was about.”

Arya steels herself before her next words. 

“Joffrey kissed Sansa a moon or two after we moved here. It was all she talked about for like a year it seemed. I just wonder what all the fuss is about.”

It’s a bit craven to use that as a crutch, she knows, but she’s not sure how to ask otherwise. 

“I know she liked Joffrey quite a lot then, but she doesn’t anymore. She still talks about kissing stories all the time. “

“I think it must be better if you actually like the person you’re kissing,” Gendry says slowly, “I don’t really remember much but shock.”

Arya tries to show the pounding in her heart on her face. 

“Can I kiss you? Just to see what it’s like?’

She doesn’t say, ‘because I already like you, it must be better.’ She still doesn’t have words for the feeling under her skin, the lack of stillness, the twisting and shifting and newness of it all. 

Gendry takes a breath, and avoids her gaze. 

“You and your father have both been good to me...I won’t have him thinking I would threaten his daughter’s virtue.”

Arya mind skids to a halt, as fast as a runaway cart down a hill. 

“Whoa,” she starts, putting her hands up, “Slow down. ‘Virtue’ is for something far off, nebulous, way in the future. I only asked for a kiss.”

Her words are as unsteady as her mind feels. 

“I won’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell anyone about you for years. No one has to know but us.”

She wrinkles her nose, her mind going to the explanation Catelyn had given her and Sansa about the “exams” the maester might do before their marriages to vouch for their maidenhood. It sounds vile. But there’s nothing they can look for to see if someone’s been kissed.

Gendry goes silent. He exhales through his nose, the sound soft. Arya’s face softens. He thinks so little of himself, just because of his birth. She reaches up to touch his shoulder, and he holds two of her fingers in one if his hands. They’re rough, from labor, but still gentle.

She smiles once, and lets him make the first move. 

His lips are soft, but Arya’s not sure what to do with her nose. She moves a little too quickly, and bumps his cheek by accident. She laughs softly, and then returns her lips to his. Her eyes close, seemingly by instinct. 

It doesn’t last long, and it’s completely chaste, but when they part, Arya feels something warm and light bubble up her chest, and she laughs again. And despite his earlier misgivings, Gendry smiles too.

They part not long after, Arya assuring him that she’ll write him other letters, and maybe try to meet here again come next full moon. She tells him to make sure he gets enough sleep that night, and feels like she floats back to the tower of the hand. As soons as she’s out of line of sight, Arya’s hand wanders up to touch her lips.

She lays awake that night, clutching her pillow, thinking that maybe Sansa was right about something. 

At five and ten, Arya just hopes that it won’t have to stay a memory.


	5. Chapter 5

The year that Arya’s five and ten, her handwriting improves dramatically.

Every single time she finds a morsel of knowledge from Ned, she does her best to pass it on to Gendry. 

She doesn’t want to go against her father’s order, at least not to the letter, so she finds a way. There’s an empty torch holder near the cellar entrance, and she begins to roll up her letters and place them in it. Gendry is now brave enough that he will venture that far by himself, even at night. 

She writes him of what Ned tells her about Mya, and the time she manages to speak a few words to her in the stables, even though it’s just asking help adjusting the straps on her bridle. 

“I think her and I would have gotten along,” Arya writes, “But she barely speaks to anyone, and Father comments that she looks thin.”

She writes of the others, as she manages to learn of them. 

The little girl’s name is Barra, she would have been born less than a year before the Starks had come to King’s Landing. Her mother had been a whore, but a young one. One who jumped at the opportunity for a different line of work. 

There’s two more, Ned admits. Twin boys named Stan and Leo, about Rickon’s age. Their mother worked in the pig yard, and so do they. 

Halfway through the year, Renly Baratheon comes to court. He brings with him a boy about Sansa’s age, named Edric, who most whisper must be Renly’s attempt at finding an heir since he seems so unwilling to marry. Arya takes one look at him and knows what he is. Cersei keeps both his and Renly’s gaze with a steeled determination, and the two of them do not waver. They must know too. 

One day, when they’re alone, Arya asks Ned why Edric could be out in front of people when none of the others were. 

“Best I can tell, his mother was likely a highborn. He has the Florent ears...his lineage probably forced Robert to treat him differently than his other bastards. “

To actually acknowledge him, Arya thinks. Ned pauses before admitting the next part. 

“He’s probably the one in most danger from Cersei, being paraded out in front of her like this.”

She relays all of this in the letters she writes to Gendry, letters that grow longer than any of the lessons she had even written for the Septa. 

Arya manages to lure him out into the Godswoods six more times that year, on the nights of full moons. 

“It’s so strange,” he tells her one of these nights. They’re lazed out, underneath an oak, that overlooks the water. 

“Ever since my mum died, it’s always been just me. I’ve never had a family, now I’ve got at least five half-siblings I’ve never even met.”

Arya can’t imagine that. Her siblings as much a part of her as her hands and feet. The other Starks are as vital to her identity as her gray eyes. 

“There might even be more,” Arya confides, “Father said when they were young Robert couldn’t seem to pass a tavern or a brothel without indulging.”

Her voice goes quiet, hard. 

“He said that based on your age, Robert must have gotten you on your mum during the Rebellion. When he was fighting to get my aunt Lyanna back. Yet still, he claimed he loved her.”

She feels like Sansa saying that, but Gendry’s snort tells her that he agrees with her. Arya shifts the conversation. 

“Everyone says I remind them of her, but they also say she was beautiful.”

“Why’s that so strange?”

Arya looks at him, amused. 

“Back at Winterfell, they used to call me ‘Arya Horseface’, I know I’m no prize.”

Gendry playfully swats the side of her face with his hand, it’s closer to a half slap than a caress, and it makes her giggle. 

“You’re not ugly. Maybe your face won’t start a war, but you’re not ugly.”

Arya opens her mouth, and he shushes her with a finger. 

“Hey now, you won’t let me get down on myself about being a bastard, so you don’t get to get down on yourself for being ugly.”

Arya understands, but she’ll never tell him that. He can’t help his birth any more than she can help her face.

He doesn’t say much after that, but Arya still feels her skin burn from the proximity. She hasn’t had the courage to steal another kiss yet.

It’s such a strange turn of phrase, to steal a kiss. But that’s how it felt, that’s how all of this felt, though Arya’s not sure who she’s stolen it from. The moon is huge in the sky, there’s only the slightest chill to the air, and before Arya stands to leave, she can’t help herself.

Their first kiss had been soft, and quick. This time, Arya takes time to memorize things. That Gendry’s lips are surprisingly soft, even if chapped. The little breath she feels hitch in his throat when she tugs his bottom lip between hers. They’re still unpracticed, but she doesn’t bump his nose this time. 

Gendry looks surprised all over again when she pulls back, musses his hair, smiles, and turns to take off. Arya doesn’t quite understand, so many men she’s met seem to think they deserve every little thing that comes their way. 

“I’ll see you next turn of the moon,” she promises him.

She practically skips back to the tower of the hand. 

The third time it happens, he wraps his arms around her shoulders and squeezes tight. The fourth time, she can’t sleep after, she tosses and turns, drifting in and out of soft, warm dreams she only half remembers, waking at one point with her hand between her legs and the whole world seeming to explode.

(Arya would freely admit that just by the fact that she is counting kisses makes her sound just as stupid as she often accused Sansa of being, but it’s not like it’s the only thing going on in her life).

Edric has begun to join Arya and Myrcella on their rides on occasion. Myrcella turns overly chatty with him, Arya notes. She tries not to feel pushed out by his presence, even though she never really felt her and the princess were the best of friends. 

Myrcella is rather chatty, but Edric is tight lipped. The story they’d been fed is that he is Lord Renly’s ward, the child of a minor house in the Stormlands, come to court to learn.

“He thinks perhaps I could become a castle’s steward, or even a master-at-arms someday,” he tells them. Myrcella nods her head, but Arya feels like she knows better. While both positions he named are common ones for second and third sons of lesser houses, Edric doesn’t even tell him which house he is from. 

While him and Myrcella are talking, Arya looks him over. He’s a little older than her, and he holds his head high, like a highborn. She does notice his ears. He has the black hair and blue eyes she had come to seek out, but he looks thin, and wane, and that’s not a common look on a noble child at all. 

At one point during the ride, his horse stills, and he shakes his head, before commenting, 

“Sorry about that, I think the cherry tart I had for breakfast didn’t agree with me.”

And he’s so unendingly polite about everything that Arya doesn’t even know how to goad him into admitting to anything. The talk afterward shifts, to Myrcella’s betrothal to a prince in Dorne. Edric’s never been, but Myrcella asks him about Storm’s End, trying to get a grasp of how other castles are different from her home in the capital. 

She asks Sansa if she’s noticed anything about him. Sansa shrugs, and looks Arya up and down, opens her mouth as though she wants to say something and doesn’t. 

Arya knows she must be holding herself differently or something, because Sansa has started to give her those looks whenever she writes her letters. One day she finally asks her who she’s writing to. 

They’re in the garden with Princess Myrcella having tea, so Arya hides her scowl and just says, “to a friend.”

That answer makes Sansa frown even harder. 

“You have friends who aren’t here?”

Myrcella wriggles her eyebrows.

“Maybe it’s a secret friend. That can be fun. I wrote letters to Trystane for moons before mother allowed us to say we were betrothed.”

Sansa raises her nose, 

“I didn’t know Arya had any friends, secret or otherwise, who could read.”

Arya knows she’s being put on then. Sansa hasn’t been needlessly cruel to her in ages. She knows she’s probably just wound up, on edge, what with having to behave in front of Joffrey and Cersei so often.

A smile quirks on Arya’s face. Sansa might like Edric, what with his more refined ways. Maybe she should try to push the two of them together. They would have to run away. It would bring shame to the Starks and Sansa would never be able to show her face in court again, but at least she wouldn’t have to marry Joffrey. 

It’s not until nearly two moons later that she thinks anything else of Edric’s comment about breakfast. 

Wandering the Red Keep in the early mornings is different than at night. Arya has to dress properly before she goes about, and nod and acknowledge people, but with practice, she can move about the keep in the glow of the early sunrise nearly as easily as she does at night. 

It started because lessons are getting to her even more than before. Sansa’s betrothal to Joffrey has been formally announced, and once she turns eighteen, there will be a tourney and a ball to celebrate before the actual ceremony. And with that set in stone, Catelyn and the Septa have become murmuring about finding a betrothal for Arya, and it turns her stomach. 

She’d always known it was coming, she wasn’t stupid. She thought she would fight it tooth and nail, but now all she feels she can do is hide. She feels like a mouse within the castle walls. 

It’s in one of these early mornings that she notices one of the gold cloaks. She doesn’t know which one, she’s not sure she knows the names of any of them. She never bothered, they were loyal to Joffrey and Cersei and would never have given her the time of day. 

This one’s carrying a tray though, a tray loaded with tarts and a wood bowl of pottage and going towards the pig yard. His head is held high, and Arya puts all of her strength into being as Syrio taught her; catlike and silent. The goldcloak doesn’t even notice. 

He leaves the tray on a barrel beside the ladder where one could climb up into a hayloft. Arya remembers climbing into the one in Winterfell. In spring and summer it was clean and dry, and a fine place to sleep. A fine place for two children to sleep. 

Arya tails the goldclock three more times on three different mornings. One morning to the stables, once doubling back towards the kitchen. She tells Ned then. 

The next moon that she manages to meet with Gendry in the Godswood, she tells him too. 

“I think...it’s awful, but I think Cersei kind of forgot about you. You said someone used to bring you food and then stopped, well the others still get food brought to them, at least in the mornings.”

“There are far worse things than being forgotten then,” Gendry replies. They’re laying flat on their backs, staring up at the sky. The stars are very bright tonight. 

“She’s keeping all of them fed,” Arya wonders, “But I still can’t figure out why.”

“Maybe she wants to use us to taunt the king,” Gendry offers up, “Use us to remind him of his infidelity to her.”

Arya rolls over on one side to look at him. 

“That might make sense,” she thinks, running a finger along the side of his face. He has stubble, and she wonders where he finds him to cut it. “But no one seems to think anything of Robert’s carousing at all, and Robert doesn’t seem to think anything of what Cersei thinks at all.”

Gendry breathes deeply, his eyes drifting close under the touch of her fingers. He still takes so long to let himself go, to allow himself to feel. 

“That’s horrible. Why even have a queen?”

Arya huffs, 

“According to my Septa, Cersei’s already done her royal duty by giving Robert sons. Anything else she does doesn’t matter apparently.”

She furrows her brow for a moment in thought, but pushes it away because Gendry reaches out to touch her shoulder, so she’s obligated to lean over and kiss him. 

(The last time they’d met here, she’d lost count. The memory of his lips featherlight along her brow, her cheeks and her ears makes her burn bright)

There’s something different about kissing like this, on their sides, face to face. It sends Arya’s mind in directions she’s previously insisted were long and far off. 

When she reaches up to run her fingers through his hair, he stiffens. She pulls back to look at him.

“Something wrong?”

Gendry’s eyes are still half closed, but he keeps stiff. 

“We shouldn’t be doing this.”

Arya sighs deeply. 

“You seemed to be enjoying it a moment ago.”

“You’re not for me,” he tells her somewhat roughly, “So we shouldn’t pretend.”

Arya doesn’t have to ask him to elaborate. She knows there’s no end to this that is happy. Even if her mother wouldn’t throw a baseborn blacksmith out on his rear (bastard of a king regardless). Even if her father didn’t see it as a violation of the goodwill he’d done for Gendry and his siblings. 

She reaches out and runs her hand down the front of his chest. 

“Does being here like this make you sad?”

Gendry’s eyes fly open. 

“Seven hells, Arya, no.”

She frowns. 

“What I said before, about everyone saying the queen’s only duty was to give the King sons? That’s my future. I’ll be betrothed to some highborn man, maybe I’ll know him, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll like him, maybe I won’t.”

She pauses, thinking of most of the men she’s seen at court. 

“Probably I won’t. It won’t matter either way, everyone will say doing it is all that I’m good for, that it’s what I’m supposed to do. Maybe he won’t let me ride my horse, or wear breeches, or play swords. Maybe I won’t ever see you again.”

The breath in her throat hitches at the thought. She lets her hand still. 

“If doing this makes you sad, we can stop. But if not...can’t you stop being such a stupid bull about everything and just let us enjoy it? Even if it can’t be forever?”

Gendry doesn’t say anything, but he throws one arm around her back and pulls her to him again, so she guesses he thought her proposition was okay. 

Walking away that night, Arya’s not sure what she’ll do when it has to stop. 

Arya’s sixteenth name day comes and goes, and three moons later, so does Sansa’s eighteenth. 

And with Sansa’s eighteenth name day, preparations for the royal wedding begin. There will be a tourney covering seven days, followed by a feast and ball, in the days before the ceremony proper will begin. 

The crown prince is marrying after all, it’s a great occasion.

Every time Arya’s forced to catch a glimpse of Joffrey, instead of just the usual revulsion she feels upon looking at his face, she feels something else she can’t quite put her finger on.

Bran’s preparing to ride in the tourney. He knows he’s not likely to win anything, but hopes he can attract the eye of some of the other knights and maybe secure himself an official squireship. 

Arya helps him when she’s allowed, though she tries not to be jealous. She doubts she could even lift the lance herself. Bran’s grown tall and lean, and he looks a little ridiculous in his armor. 

At least he agrees. 

“I feel like a stiff breeze could knock me over from up here,” he admits to Arya when she’s helping him dismount. 

“Is Mother still giving you all seven hells about wanting to ride?” she asks. 

Bran nods. 

“She finally realized I could have a worse hobby than climbing. Getting hit with the lance is no joke.”

Arya’s about to open her mouth and ask if she could climb up onto his horse and at least see how the lance feels in her hands, when a servant approaches. 

“Lady Arya,” he says, “Your father has requested your presence in his solar.”

Arya’s so confused she doesn’t even object to not getting to ride.

When she enters Ned’s solar, his face is dead serious. 

“Bolt the door behind you,” he tells Arya, and she does so. 

Arya barely has time to ask, 

“Father what-”

Before Ned cuts her off. He puts both his hands on her shoulders and squeezes tightly, like he’s trying to hold her in place. 

“Arya, what I’m about to tell you cannot leave this room. Pieces have already started to fall, and…”

His sentence trails off. Arya sits at the table, back ramrod straight, at attention. Ned sits at one of the other chairs, his head in his hands. 

“When you realized who Gendry and the others were...what made you think that?”

Arya blinks. She’s not sure what she expected, but this wasn’t it. 

“They all look like him, the black hair and blue eyes. You couldn’t look at them and then look at King Robert and not know they were his-”

Arya cuts herself off, with a gasp of realization. She claps her hands to her mouth. Black hair, blue eyes, the lot of them. Joffrey, Tommen, Myrcella. Not a one of them with either. Not a one of them looking a bit like the king.

Ned fixes her eyes with his own. 

“You understand the reason that this can’t leave the room?”

Arya’s horrified. 

“King Robert...he could execute her for this couldn’t he?”

Ned’s eyes are empty. How awful must it be to think of your oldest friend like this.

“I think Cersei knows it. Stan and Leo, the two bastard boys who lived over the pigyard...they both died yesterday. No cause of death announced, but both boys were healthy when I saw them last.”

Arya’s fingernails press little half-moons into her face, she’s covering her mouth so tightly. Two of his bastards dead, possibly killed, just when there’s the threat of the king discovering her treachery, it’s too much of a coincidence…

Her thoughts are interrupted by a harsh knock on the door. 

“Can it wait?” Ned calls out.

There’s another, more frantic knock.

“Lord Stark,” the voice on the other side of the door calls out, and with a lurch in her stomach, Arya recognizes it as Jory. 

“Lord Stark,” the voice continues, “There’s been an accident on the training yard, you need to come, it’s Bran.”

Arya’s horror turns to sheer unadulterated terror as she jumps from her chair, well out in front of Ned, to run and see what’s happened. 

Arya’s six and ten, and has a feeling her world is on the brink of shattering.


	6. Chapter 6

Six and ten and all her years later, Arya will never forget the sight of Bran’s broken leg twisted and deformed. It’s the bone in his upper leg, close to his hip. Maester Pycelle says it may be well over a year until he can walk again, if ever.

He’d slammed his head into the ground as well. If he hadn’t still had his helm on then he could have died. As it was, he took a hard hit, and couldn’t say quite what had happened when he woke up.

“All I remember was riding Storm and then black,” Bran tells them when he finally wakes from the milk of the poppy induced sleep Pycelle had put him under while he set his leg. “I guess something spooked him, and he threw me.”

That’s horseshit, and Arya feels like Bran knows it. Storm was well trained, and had never so much as stumbled. It would take a great fright to even make him bolt, much less throw off his rider. And Bran’s leg…

Arya can’t quite remember what Maester Luwin had taught them what that bone was called, but she recalls that it was supposed to be one of the strongest bones in the body. A fall from a horse shouldn’t have been enough. Arya doesn’t think it was an accident, but she’s frightened to say so.

It will take ages for him to heal, and Ned insists that he shouldn’t have to do it in the capital. So in less than a fortnite, as soon as his condition stabilizes, Bran and Catelyn are loaded into the wheelhouse to return to Winterfell.

Bran is completely bereft when Arya sees him leave. This is basically the end of his dream.

Arya bids them a tearful farewell, and tries not to be too terribly jealous. 

Everyone is walking on eggshells in the following weeks. 

Arya manages to sneak around in the tunnels when the septas come to take Stan and Leo’s bodies away to the sept. There will be no funerals for them, the two bastard boys, but the least they could do, Arya thinks, is not cart them away in front of their mother.

She sees one’s hand sticking out of the cart, his skin pale with a strange, almost silvery sheen. 

The plans for the tourney continue. 

The next full moon is the second to last day of when the tourney is planned. Arya’s skin itches again. There’s danger all around her, and she can’t think of anything to do about it, she can feel it in her bones. She’s not sure if she should say anything to Ned about it, she’s not sure what she even could say, and all she wants to do is talk to Gendry. 

She writes him what she can, but she’s not sure what’s safe to say. He writes her back, when he can, scrawled on the back of her letters in his still rough, He consoles her over Bran, understands how devastating it would have been. Tells her of another boy, an apprentice smith, who’d leaned too close to the fire and fell, burned his hands nearly to black. That boy wouldn’t smith anymore, he’d been on the mercy of the gods and the septas. 

Arya’s so worried, she doesn’t even fight having her gown for the ball made and fitted. It is beautiful, silvery gray silk, the same shade as the rabbit fur in her cloak, even if the skirt is volominous and hard to run in. 

Sansa finishes it up, her hand as steady and certain as any professional seamstress. 

She twists, and bends over to grab something, and her rolled up sleeves ride up even further up her elbows, and Arya just barely catches a glimpse…

She grabs Sansa’s arm and forcefully pushes the sleeve upwards, ignoring her objections. The bruise is angry, purple with spots already turning yellow-brown. Sansa snatches her arm back before Arya can search any further. 

“Did the prince give you that?” Arya demands. 

Sansa looks away. 

“It doesn’t matter. Soon we’ll be married, and I’ll only have to see him in public. I’ll have guards all around me…”

Her voice trails off and Arya has to stop herself from screaming. Screaming that those guards will likely be the king’s men, not hers. Screaming to Sansa that Joffrey’s not even a prince, but a rotten bastard. She has to use all her willpower to squeeze it down, to squash the urge. No one can know, Ned had said. 

“Tommen told me he wanted to join the Kingsguard so he could protect me...Bran too, before... That’s what Ser Jamie did. He joined the Kingsguard so his sister wouldn’t be alone here...some good it did.”

Arya barely has time to acknowledge that yes, the Kingslayer did seem unsually close to his twin, before her brain starts screaming again. 

“The queen knows this?”

Sansa snorts. Arya is astonished, she’s never heard Sansa make that noise before.

“I wonder if the queen knows much of anything anymore. She’s drunk on wine half the time, rambling on about things that don’t make sense. She said once that Robert’s struck her before...that made me feel bad, but then she laughed like it didn’t matter. She keeps going on and on about how she’ll show him…The things about Lord Baelish and Jon Arryn, and something about imports from Essos...I don’t know how her mind gets to where it does.

Sansa takes a deep breath before plastering a smile on her face.

“At least soon, I will be queen, and she won’t be able to make anyone else suffer.”

Arya thinks on that for a while. Once her son marries, Cersei’s power will be diminished. Once Robert dies, she might as well not be a royal anymore. Would she go home then, to Casterly Rock? Would that make her happy?

Arya thinks going home to Winterfell would make her happier than anything, but not without knowing her family and friends were safe. 

The first day of the tourney comes. Arya smiles brightly and forces Sansa to the edge of the bench, on her one side, Ned on her other. No room for princes to force themselves. They’re not even wed yet, she insists. 

She wants to enjoy the tourney. She would normally, would lap it up, would eagerly watch the riders and try to learn their tricks, pick a favorite and cross her fingers for them. Daydream about entering one herself. Aunt Lyanna had, she had said that the joust was nine-tenths horsemanship, and Arya could ride as well as a boy. 

But everytime she looks at the horses, and the lance, her stomach sinks and she thinks of Bran. 

No bone would break like that from a fall from a horse. 

There’s a rush of stiff applause, and Arya watches the man they call the Mountain that Rides. He looks like he could break a man in two with just his pinky finger. He’s one of Cersei Lannister’s prized champions, or Tywin Lannister’s rabid dog, depending on who you asked. 

She watches him holding the lance, and feels a chill on the back of her neck.

The next day, the melee, she begs off the festivities, claiming an upset stomach. She wonders at the empty seat beside Sansa, and her heart lifts when it ends up being taken by Edric Storm. 

“My uncle is off seeking the maester, hoping to find a tea for my constitution,”

“Perhaps I should find him,” Arya interjects, “I’m feeling a bit out of sorts myself. I think we should both lay off the cherries.”

She tilts her head, and sees the very base of Edric’s hands. Marked with an ever so slight metallic sheen. Arya does her best to meet her father’s eyes, but she can’t be sure if he sees.

Sneaking into the kitchens is easy enough. The servants who can are outside watching the tourney, one of the bits of the entertainment there for all, those who aren’t are rushing about in early preperation for the feast that will end it. 

Most of them pay her no mind. Lady Arya Stark never yelled or gave them trouble. Oh if they had known Arya Underfoot. She finds Mheagan easily enough, Barra sticking closely to her side. The little girl is bigger now, nearly five or six, though still quite small. Big enough to fetch and carry, but too small to stray from her mother’s side and be seen. 

Today, she has a whining tone in her voice. Arya recognizes it, from Rickon, or shamefully, from her own voice on occasion. 

“Mumma, I’m hungry,”

“Then you should have eaten your breakfast.”

“Don’t like cherries.”

Arya wrinkles her nose. There they are again, those cherries. 

Something in her mind blinks to life. And that’s how Arya finds herself in the Red Keep library when there’s a tournament going on outside. 

It’s not hard to find the book. She’d found it by accident before, it had been sitting on one of the tables when the Septa had been teaching her and Sansa their history. Arya had been admonished for reading it instead of listening, but she remembers. 

Why a book on poisons had been so easily accessible had never occurred to her.

The joili nut, she read, was once a popular snack food in parts of Essos until it was discovered that consumption over time would cause poisons to build up in the eater’s body, causing weakness and stomach upset, eventually leading to vomiting, seizures, and death from too much. 

They could be distinguished by the almondesque taste, at times almost tasting like ripe cherries, and the slight metallic look caused by the oils staining the skin.

Cherry tarts, is all Arya can think of. She smuggles the book out under her jerkin, and when Ned returns to the tower, she’s left it open to the correct page. 

Early the next morning, Arya wakes to a note from Ned atop a pile of packages wrapped in burlap. 

“Take the top to the kitchen, leave it behind the flour barrel. The middle to the stable, on the ladder above the saddle rack. The bottom is for Gendry, I trust you know where to leave it. Renly has Edric covered. We’re getting them out before this week is through.”

Being the ghost of the red keep has it’s benefits. 

She saves Gendry’s package for last, and risks Ned’s wrath by sneakiing down to see him. 

It’s early, only a tiny strip of sun, and he’s still asleep on his cot. 

He sits up, blinking, when she flings the package at his chest. 

“Hold onto those and listen. We’re sneaking you out, you and your siblings too. “

“What are you-”

Arya shushes him, sitting on the edge of his cot. 

“The queen’s children are bastards. They aren’t the kings. We think she was keeping the rest of you around...poisoning the others, so she could have something to hold over King Robert’s head if he ever found out about her infidelity.”

Gendry laughs roughly. The golden children, flaunted in front of all of King’s Landing, bastards just like him. She doesn’t tell him the other bit, that other thing Ned confided in her. She had watched Jamie Lannister in the first days of the tournament, her stomach twisting each time in disgust. She hopes it’s not true, but Lord Renly has insisted that the rumours have persisted about the Queen and her twin for years. 

“So your-”

“We’re sending Mheagan and Barra up north to Winterfell. You and Mya are going to the Riverlands, and Renly’s sneaking Edric back to Storm’s End right after the ball. “

She reaches out and squeezes Gendry’s hands tight. Her heart tugs. She would say that she wishes they could send him to Winterfell, but she’s not sure where she’s even going to end up when this is all done. If Ned’s accusations don’t go as planned...there could be war, and it’s better if they aren’t all in one place.

She hesitates, before handing him the other package she had grabbed when she brought Ned’s. 

Gendry’s eyes go wide when he unwraps the sword. 

“You’re giving me Needle?” he asks breatheless. Arya is similarly out of breath when she responds. 

“You’ll need it more than me. I know you can make yourself a better sword, but on the road, until you get to where my father’s sending you…” her voice trails off, words rendered babbles, “Right now you need it more than me,” she steels her voice, “And when you see me again, you can give it back.”

She surges forward and kisses him, once, hard. She pulls back, his eyes are so incredibly blue. 

“I’ll come and find you when it’s time to leave...please stay safe.”

Arya bounces on her heels for the rest of the tourney. Ned whispers more of his plans to her. All three groups will leave in the early morning, once the ball is officially over, when most of the castle will be too drunk or hungover to pay attention, and Arya must help them be ready. 

He also tells her that he’s sending Sansa away with Renly and Edric. 

“That will put her in danger too-” Arya tells him. Ned nods. 

“But she will be far away from here, and I do trust Renly. He may not be the most brilliant or thoughtful of lords but he is not cruel and he is not duplicitious. He would bear her no ill will. And if she stays here, than she will be in danger too.”

The tourney and the ball will end, the ghosts will disappear into the night and the next day, Ned will levy his accusations at the queen. These accusations of adultery, treason and incest. Arya doesn’t ask what will happen to her, or what will happen to him. 

At the suggestion of a visitor from the Reach, the ball will be a masquerade. That evening, Sansa and Arya prepare their masks. Sansa’s is simple, it barely covers her eyes. 

Arya tsks at her while adding the fake fur to her wolf mask, that will go all the way over her head, like a helm. 

“What’s the point of that, everyone will know it’s you.”

Sansa smiles sadly. 

“Everyone will already know it’s me. They all do.”

Sansa’s gown is a gorgeous pale gold, enveloping her pale figure and making her look all the more regal, despite the anxious look on her face, and the filmy shawl hiding the marks on her arms. Arya’s heart tugs in her chest. She so desperately wants to tell her sister that everything will be okay, that she won’t have to marry that awful prince, but she knows how to keep mum, and she must. 

The jousting ends, and the melee, and the archery contests, and Arya would be hard pressed to tell you the names of any of the winners. She doesn’t like this and hopes it ends soon.

Arya dresses for the feast and the ball, and tries not to let her worry show on her face. Sansa helps her lace up her gown and Arya places the wolf mask over her face, braids pinned neatly underneath. 

Ned pauses outside when the handmaiden leaves, looking them both over. It’s been so long since he’s looked happy at all, that Arya beams. 

“You look lovely,” he says, giving each girl a hug over their shoulders. “The both of you.”

When he hugs Arya, he slips her a bit of paper, which she tucks into her waist pocket. They’ve already discussed this, but she wanted it just in case. 

“I’ll see you both at the feast.”

Arya and Sansa walk to the great hall arm in arm. Arya feels that her face must look preoccupied, because Sansa whispers to her, 

“Thinking about your secret friend?”

Arya chuckles. She knew she was going to regret letting Myrcella call him that. 

“One of these days, I’ll tell you all about him. But for tonight, I can’t.”

Sansa wiggles her eyebrows, and Arya realizes she’d never even let it slip before that Gendry was a “he”. Suddenly, she does wish she could tell Sansa all about him. As fun as it had been keeping him a secret all these years, suddenly, she just wants her sister’s advice. 

The feast is lavish and rich. The centerpiece is what must be an entire roast auroch, with leeks and potatoes and huge boats of gravy. Smaller platters abound, rabbit in wine sauce, crispy fried duck, ocean fish wrapped in bacon. Arya barely has a tiny bit of each and she’s already nearly stuffed even before getting to the side dishes, the piles of oat breads, the parsnips and onions boiled in gravy, the little fried fishfingers. She barely even wants to look at the desserts, the gorgeous cream swans and piles of cakes, though she manages a single honey biscuit. 

The spirits are flowing freely, and Arya watches as the king and queen at the high table make their way through what seems like it must be a whole barrel each. Sansa sips daintily at a single glass of Dornish red, while Arya slowly learns to appreciate her own cup of mead. No one else around them seems to be holding back.

By the time most of the dishes have been cleared, the music has started and the dancing begun, Arya is so full she feels like she can’t move. The nerves deep inside her don’t help. She can’t think that after tonight, she doesn’t know when (or even if) she’ll ever see Gendry again. Him being safe has to be the most important bit. 

When the dancing begins, Sansa can’t refuse Joffrey’s offerred hand. He’d crossed all the way across the hall to ask of course, and this feast is in celebration of their upcoming marriage!

Everyone in the crowd are in masks. Some are as simple as Sansa’s (much as Arya said, the blue feathers do little to disguise her fair face and red hair), others are elaborate, more like headdresses than masks. Cersei herself is wearing a fringed golden mask, likely intended to resemble a lion. King Robert has apparently foregone the theme of the ball, and wears no mask.

Arya dances a few times. She’s not great, but as far as most of the expected ladies skills she was expected to gain, dancing is far from the most obnoxious, so she mostly sticks to the sidelines, watching. 

King Robert is so drunk that he’s begun to slump over, though his mouth is still moving. Cersei’s back is ramrod straight, but her hand never leaves her wine glass, and it is never empty. 

The night goes on, the crowd waxes and wanes, and Arya listens closely for the faraway sound of the time-keepers’ chimes. She’s waiting for twelve, the hour of the ghost. 

Just when the night is beginning to drag on, and she hears the chimes go to eleven, Arya feels a tap on her shoulder. 

The clothes he wears are simple, a wool tunic and leather breeches, but well made enough not to be out of place at the ball. He wears a simple black mask covering the upper part of his face, underneath the black iron helm, horns twisted to the front. All Arya has to see is his eyes before a grin sprouts on her face.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, excitedly, grasping both of Gendry’s hands in hers. 

“Your father left a bit ago to go and rouse us all, so we could get ready,” he nods off to the edge of the ballroom, where Ned sits with a mug of ale, as though he’d never left. He’d only been wearing the simplest of black masks before, and is now bare-faced. “He gave me the mask, said he thought I might want to see you before we leave.”

Arya feels her face glow red, and she glances, embarrassed, towards where Ned sits. 

“I’m glad he did.”

She reaches out and touches the helm. The metal is smooth, the horns well shaped. 

“Is this-” she asks in awe. 

Gendry nods. 

“Your father went out, found Master Mott. He wanted to make sure I didn’t have any belongings I wanted to take with me.”

Arya swallows a lump in her throat. Of course Father thought of that. 

“Have you ever been to the Riverlands?” Arya asks, choking back the emotion in her voice.

Gendry chuckles in response. 

“I’ve never been out of King’s Landing.”

“Well it’s much nicer. I haven’t been many places there, but they’re all better than King’s Landing.” Arya assures him “Most places don’t stink like this.”

Inch by inch, the eleventh hour ticks by. 

“Would you like to dance?” Arya asks at one point. Gendry quirks an eyebrow. 

“This is a very rare offer, so I suggest you take me up on it.”

Gendry stands slowly, taking his hands in hers. 

“I don’t really know how,” he admits. 

Arya giggles. 

“Don’t worry, neither do I.”

No one else on the dancefloor is paying any attention to them, the wine having flowed too freely. Arya hadn’t even finished her mead, but the butterflies in her stomach still take flight when Gendry places one hand on her shoulder and one on her waist like she shows him. As time keeps ticking, the butterflies turn to a body-wide sense of warmth. She rests her chin on his shoulder, and wonders if this was what all of Sansa’s breathless, giggly stories were trying to tell. 

Their pleasant reverie is interrupted, by a sudden clamor and yelling. The two of them turn to find that King Robert, red-faced and full of rage. Cersei is standing, as red-faced as the king and shouting. Arya and Gendry are clear on the far side, and can’t hear what’s being said, but even from the distance, Arya would swear she sees the Queen’s lips stained silver.

Arya turns to Gendry, looks him up and down, and says, 

“Let’s get out of here.”

She takes his hand and they slip out of the ballroom. The stairs outside that the walk following Ned’s direction twist around the outside, and when there’s a sudden loud noise, Arya can kneel and peer down through one of the balconies.

There’s another noise, more recognizable as a crash, and people start yelling in alarm, and milling about, and there’s someone on the floor, and Gendry tugs Arya’s hand and they leave it behind.

The path they follow comes out behind the stables. When they get there, there are already three horses saddled up, and one of the Stark’s men already in the saddle. 

Mheagen holds Barra, who’s sleepy but not quite out, in her arms. She looks a little wane, and Arya suddenly wonders if she’d been eating any of the food left for her daughter and inadvertently consuming the poison. Gendry takes her from her, and lets Mheagen mount the light brown mare before handing her daughter back to her. 

It gives Arya an odd feeling, seeing him hold a young child.

The two of them, and the guard, leave first, once they have their packs. Mheagen looks frightened, and Arya wishes deeply for their safety. She hopes Winterfell isn’t too much for them.

Mya is tall, nearly as tall as Sansa, and despite her diminished weight, the joili nut doesn’t seem to have taken much of an effect on her. Her and Gendry catch each other’s gaze, and Arya can’t quite name the emotion going through them. 

Mya can mounts her horse easily, but Gendry’s never been on a horse in his life, and Arya has to show him how to step into the stirrup and swing his leg over. 

“Let her do most of the work,” she tells him, still gripping his hand. 

She doesn’t have time to even attempt a farewell, when they’re interrupted by the thumping of feet. Arya spins rapidly, expected Gold Cloaks. Instead she just sees Ned, holding a bundle, sweaty and frantic. 

He shoves the bundle into Arya’s arms. 

“Go,” he tells her.

“Father what-”

“It’s not safe,” his voice spills, “The king is dead, the queen too. Poison. Joffrey ordered the city closed off.”

Arya’s head swims, but Ned is already looking from Gendry to Mya. 

“Keep her safe,” and they both nod solemnly. 

He hugs Arya, whispering.

“You remember Harwin right?”

Arya’s head is still swimming. 

“The master of horse from Winterfell-”

Ned runs a hand along the back of her head, unpinning her braids. 

“He’s living in the Riverlands now. He’s loyal, you can trust him.”

He looks Arya up and down. 

“Can you ride in that gown?”

This is real, Arya suddenly realizes. 

“Umm, help me unlace,” she asks, turning her back. Ned pulls her laces on her gown, and laughs softly when she lets it drop to the ground, revealing the deerskin breeches she’d slipped on underneath, and tucking her shift up around her waist. Old habits are hard to break. 

Ned hands her the gown, folded up, along with the bundle. 

“You should be able to sell that, but don’t right away. People might come looking.”

Arya mounts the horse in front of Gendry, clutching the bundles, and one of Ned’s hands. 

“What about Sansa and Edric?” She asks, in a very small voice.

Ned sighs. 

“I’ll do what I can for them,” he rubs the back of Arya’s hand, above her thumb. “Be safe, Little Wolf.”

Arya has to show Gendry how to kick to get the horse to move. It’s still pitch black as they leave the Red Keep behind, the lights from the celebration still shining in the distance. 

Arya’s not even seven-and-ten yet, and she’s not sure where her life is going to go.


	7. Chapter 7

Arya spends her seven and tenth name day on the road along the Blackwater Rush.

It shouldn’t have taken them so long to reach the inn that Ned had directed them to just south of Riverrun, but the journey was slow and often complicated. They keep off the main road, avoiding villages if they can, and making camp at night. They couldn’t do anything to call attention to themselves, not when all of the information they can get out of King’s Landing is second hand. 

They’re still not entirely sure if what they hear is true. 

Arya spends much of the early days of their journey teaching Gendry the best way to stay on his horse. As a city boy, he is not suited to riding long term, and the bouncing in the saddle makes him surly and unpleasant. 

Sometimes when it gets bad, Arya dismounts and rides with Mya instead, or sometimes even walks. She insists it’s to spare the poor horse having to carry their combined weight for too long. 

Mya’s fun to talk to, so Arya pelts her with questions. She tells the both of them about how she grew up in the Vale, and before she’d been brought to King’s Landing she had led teams of mules up the treacherous rocky roads and paths. 

“I do remember our father coming around when I was little, before he was the King,” she tells them, “Mother told me he came even after he lost interest in her. When Jon Arryn came to see me and invited me back to King’s Landing...I guess I just thought maybe I’d gotten lucky and he wanted me around again.”

It makes Arya sad, how little regard Robert had for any of his children.

“You lead mules? That’s pretty amazing,” Arya comments. Mya smiles shyly, petting her steed’s mane. With her short hair and trousers and confidence in the saddle, Arya feels her and Mya are going to be fast friends. 

The package that Ned had given her was mostly clothes; smallclothes, a couple spare shirts, her extra breeches, a green wool kirtle she previously only wore when forced and her cloak. It’s only autumn still, but winter is creeping closer and while the Riverlands are far more mild than Winterfell, the snow will still fall. 

Strangely enough, Arya finds herself enchanted by the look of the land around her. The trees here have turned, all colors of red and gold, and even the Blackwater Rush is clear and blue this far from the city. 

Not that the journey is all pleasant. 

Arya manages to sell her gown rather quickly. It’s not for a great sum of money, but enough in case of necessity. Which means that for most of the trip, they sleep outside if it’s dry, and Arya does her best to hunt for their dinner. 

Admittedly, after chasing cats, squirells and rabbits are quite easy. Mya, it turns out, knows how to make a simple rope snare, so that works out well enough. 

The nights are lonely. They sleep in shifts so there’s someone always keeping watch. When Arya was younger, she’d shared a bed with Sansa, to both of their consternation. Despite this, it had been strange to come to King’s Landing and have a whole bed to herself. Now she doesn’t even know where Sansa is. 

Laying in the grass one night, Arya quietly admits, 

“I’ve never been away from my family for this long before.”

Gendry starest off into the deep blue of the sky. There’s been a series of increasingly beautiful clear, sunny days, even as the temperature drops. 

“I still don’t know how to handle the open space,” Gendry responds slowly, “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up back in that cellar.”

“Being above the stables wasn’t so bad,” Mya comments from the other side of the fire, “Until it was. I never realized how much I needed other people before until I was stuck in that hayloft not having seen a living person in three days.”

Arya will never let them go back there, not either of them. 

It’s during one of these unusually clear, beautiful nights that Arya can’t resist the urge to kiss Gendry again. She just wants a little comfort in this uncertain time, and it seems he feels the same. 

Gendry’s hands are winding their way through her hair, when suddenly Arya hears from the other side of the fire,

“If you’re gonna do that ‘stead of keepin’ watch, can’t you at least wait til I’m completely asleep?”

They break apart, embarrassed.

Over the next few days, Arya feels Mya watching her. 

When she finally can’t take it, and asks her why she’s staring, Mya tells her, 

“Just don’t hurt him okay?”

They’re gathering kindling for the fire, and Arya is so surprised by that that she actually drops her bundle. 

“Wh-why would you think that I was going to do that?”

Mya’s face is stony, impassive. 

“I had a boy back in the Vale. He was a squire. He said he would marry me when he became a knight proper. Then he did, and his parents made him a match with a highborn girl he’d never met, and I had to watch him marry her.”

Arya sits on the ground, holding the bundle of sticks on her lap. Thinking about this makes her insides ache. 

“I’m sorry,” she tells Mya first, “That sounds awful. “

She pokes at the ground with a stick.

“That was always the future I thought I would have. And I didn’t want it, I didn’t want any of it. I didn’t like being proper, and I didn’t want to be a pawn for anyone’s game. I still don’t want any of that.”

Mya sits beside her. 

“If I was a proper lady, I would have never met Gendry. Proper ladies don’t wander around in cellars chasing cats. And proper ladies don’t carry on entirely clandestine friendships with bastards, even kings bastards.”

“Friendships?” Mya asks with a raise of an eyebrow. 

Arya laughs.

“It started like that. The kissing’s new.”

And some days, the kissing helps keep her from slipping down into despair. 

Even the unusually beautiful days are marred by fear. Every twig breaking or distance rock falling makes Arya think they’re being chased by the Queen’s men. Or the king’s men, they’re Joffrey’s now, she supposes. 

It’s the morning that Arya notices the horses are nervous. They’re just past Harrenhal when Arya quietly tells them,

“There’s something following us, but I don’t think it’s human.”

Mya’s eyes go wild.

“Do you think it’s a bear, or a shadowcat-’

Arya shakes her head softly. 

“I don’t think it will hurt us. It’s been following us for a long time, but it hasn’t struck.”

Arya gets her answer two days down the line. She’s extinguishing the fire when there’s a rustling in the nearby bushes causing her to go stiff. Her hand reaches for Needle, when the huge, gray figure walks straight into the clearing as though she feared nothing. 

“Nymeria?” Arya whispers breathlessly. The wolf, now the size of a small pony, went straight towards her, knelt, and rested her snout on Arya’s lap. 

Arya’s rubbing her hands through Nymeria’s fur, when she realizes Mya and Gendry are both staring at her in horror. Gendry steps towards her, slowly, carefully, but Mya is still frozen.

“This is Nymeria,” she tells Mya, rubbing Nymeria’s ears and making her back paw thump.

Nymeria continues trailing them, not too close. Not close enough to be spotted by anyone else they wander across, not close enough to spook the horses. But at night, she keeps close. Close enough to help keep them warm as the temperature drops. Arya wonders if part of Nymeria think they’re pups.

Father must have let her out, let her leave the Godswood to follow them the night they fled. This is the thought that propels Arya through the next few days. 

Then the rain starts. 

Camping had been difficult enough as it was, with their minimal supplies, but they had made due, and between the three of them, they could survive, even if barely, off the land. 

The rain stops all of this. Now they are cold and wet, instead of just tired and hungry and frightened. The heavy, freezing downpour soaks their clothes and bedding, extinguishes their fires, and sends most of the prey further into the woods. After less than half a day, Mya begins shivering heavily, and Arya wonders if maybe the poison had some lingering effect on her health after all.

They stay at the first inn they come by, the room costing one of their carefully hoarded coins. 

The innkeeper pays them no mind and they try to warm up by the fire and eat their stew and bread. It’s been a long time since they’ve had a real proper, hot meal, Arya thought. It would be nice to sleep in a real bed again. 

But it also means that they have to listen to the others in the inn. They’ve managed to avoid others, and they don’t know anyone here, what if Joffrey had spies...Arya sips her stew and tries to keep her head down. 

Some of the men in the Inn have apparently come from King’s Landing, and they go on and on about the new boy king. Their words aren’t complimentary, even the ones about King Robert. Some say the queen killed the king and then herself, some say the king poisoned the queen and then drank the poison himself. A few insist that the new king obviously did in his own parents, the sadistic little shit. Arya just tries to ignore what they say. They don’t know if any of it is true. 

Which becomes harder and harder when one of the men, a travelling merchant apparently, starts talking about the last execution he saw while in King’s Landing.

“One swing, and his head came clean off! Imagine that, one day you’re hand of the king, the next your head’s on a pike!”

Arya stomach upturns itself, her stew spilling itself back into her bowl. 

“‘msorry, “ Gendry tells the innkeeper, helping Arya up and throwing an arm around her shoulder to help cover her face. “I think my sister must still be feeling the road. We’ll get out of your hair.”

Arya can’t even summon the energy to object to being called his sister.

The room they’ve been giving is tiny, with a single bed that looks like it’s about to split at the corners. Arya’s proud of herself that she manages to make it to the bed before collapsing into tears.

The featherbed shifts beneath them when Gendry sits beside her, and her head slumps into the crook of his neck as her tears continue to slip free and the hacking sobs force their way from her throat. 

Gendry takes her hands in his and squeezes them. He’s been much more openly affectionate with her lately, though he still pulls back and says they shouldn’t sometimes, and right now Arya is incredibly grateful for it. 

Part of Arya’s mind tries to convince herself that what that man said could not be true. That Ned had had a plan, he wouldn’t have been executed. 

But she remembers how frightened and frantic his face had been the night they left. How tightly he had held her before letting go. He knew this was a risk. 

That doesn’t stop the hole from opening up and sucking in what remained of her heart. 

Arya’s sobs have slowed when the door opens softly, and Mya steps in to join them.

“‘M so sorry Arya,” she says, sitting on Arya’s other side. 

“Your father was a good man,” Gendry assures her, “Most men in his position wouldn’t have given half a shit about us.”

After some time, Arya’s sobs finally cease, though the ache in her chest remains, and she suspects it will never leave.

“Mya,” she says into the silence, “Did those men down in the main room say anything about who’s Hand of the King now?”

There’s a pause, and Mya bites her lip before answering. 

“I didn’t recognize them. Somebody named Baelish.”

Arya’s heart stops and her blood freezes. It’s all she can think about for the rest of the night, even crammed into the tiny bed between Gendry and Mya. She never liked Baelish, and had heard others call him duplicitious for years. It made too much sense. Play on the queen’s spitefulness and dissatisfaction, play on the king’s love of drink. Play on the prince’s sense of unfettered entitlement and desire to be unchallenged. All ending with him holding the power. 

“I’ll kill him for this,” she whispers, unsure if Gendry’s still awake to hear. If Baelish still lives, he will die by my hand.”

They call him Littlefinger, and he is not a large man. Arya wonders how many jolli nuts she would have to shove down his throat to make him die right there. She wonders if Needle would be enough to cut through his skinny little neck. 

Silence, and Arya assumes she was unheard, before Gendry’s voice responds, low and gravely. 

“I think the best way you could get revenge would be to survive. Live through this and tell everyone. What your father wanted to do.”

He doesn’t say anything else, and his eyes are still squeezed shut, but he reaches out and pulls her to his chest. Arya breathes in deeply, letting his scent wash over her. Letting the warmth ease her mind, or at least attempt to.

The rain continues, but much more lightly, and so they leave. 

In the days following their night at the inn, Arya still occasionally feels attacks of despair. She’s a girl now without a father. When she starts to slump and her breathing starts to stutter, Gendry will lean forwards and hug her tight to himself. 

“I remember when my mum died,” he tells her, whispering into her neck, “I felt like I was all alone. I felt that way until my master took me in, and still sometimes after that. I would have probably fallen to that again in that cellar if I hadn’t met you.”

Arya’s heart begins to flutter. It’s been doing that a lot during very inappropriate times. 

“You’re not alone though. Your mother and brothers are still alive, back in Winterfell. And you have us now.”

“You may be away from your family now,” Mya interjects from her horse, “The two of us can act as your family until you can get back to them.”

The closer they get to the Riverrun, the more Arya is stuck on this. Should she leave once they find Harwin? Should she try to go home to Winterfell? She misses her mother terribly, and Robb and Bran and Rickon will be there, and maybe Sansa even made it back somehow…

But she can’t leave Gendry and Mya. Father told them to take care of her, and so she has to do the same for them. She won’t be able to leave until she can be sure they’re safe. 

That night, she rolls over and lays her hand on Gendry’s chest and her face on his shoulder. She doesn’t really want to leave them at all. 

A few days later, Gendry presents her with a bouquet of half crushed wildflowers. Arya’s so shocked, she can’t even say thank you. She never once in her life thought that anyone would give her flowers. That seemed like something from one of Sansa’s stories, but it feels different here, somehow. 

Mya sees her wandering aimlessly with them flowers clutched between her fingers and starts laughing. 

“What?”

“Gendry asked me the other day what he should do if he had wanted to court you and you was just a regular bastard like us, not a highborn lady in exile.”

Arya looks down at her hands dubiously. 

“And you told him to pick me flowers?”

Mya laughs again. 

“Told him to give you a gift of some kind. There’s no forge here, so he can’t make you anything, and I don’t think he’s much of a hand at woodworking. He can’t even linger around offering to fix things for you. And he can’t impress you by hunting, you’re better than him anyway.”

Mya glances over to the end of the clearing, where Gendry’s remounted his horse, pointedly not looking in their direction.

“I think he’s worried you don’t like them,” then softer, “I think he wanted to find some way to make you feel better.”

Arya looks back down at the flowers in her hands, suddenly precious, if still silly. She tucks the stems into the end of her braid, and goes to join Gendry on his horse. She climbs in front of him, not saying a word, but lets her braid fall down her back, where she knows he can see it. 

Mya can’t stop herself from laughing at them afterwards.

They find Harwin where Ned said they would, in a tavern south of Riverrun. Tavern might be the proper word, but from the number of pretty young women without much excess clothing, the main purpose is fairly clear, even to Arya. 

She barely recognizes him, his hair has begun to thin and he has grown a beard. His eyes light up seeing her, though she puts a finger to her lips to shush him. 

She waits outside with the horses, eyes training through the tavern windows for Harwin to follow her. 

“I’ll lead you three off tomorrow, it’s only a few days ride from here, and you’ll be safe. It’s an inn run by two sisters named Heddle. Their father’s passed on, and they’re protecting a group of orphaned children there. They could use the extra hands, and they won’t turn you in.”

Orphaned children, Arya sticks on, she still has a mother at least. 

“Harwin-” she interrupts, “Is my father really dead?”

Harwin bows his head. 

“I’m afraid so, child. I heard the day I reached the Riverlands. Took all I could not to ride back and get revenge myself. But he was my lord, and now I’m on my own. His ghost would come back and smite me if I didn’t keep you safe though.”

Harwin pauses a long time. 

“Once we get you there, you must stay. It’s not just your father-”

Arya’s heart sinks again, 

“His discoveries have found their way out of the capital. Your brother’s declared war over his execution, and Stannis and Renly will likely soon follow.”

War. This was what Ned was worried about. Joffrey on the throne, a bastard, but no way to prove it, Robert’s brothers at odds.

And Robb...and to think part of Arya had wanted to run straight for Winterfell. War. Would she lose him too?

Arya coughs to interrupt the conversation. 

“I should go rescue my companions and tell them the plan.”

Rescue ends up being the appropriate word. When she re-enters the tavern, the little out of the way table Gendry and Mya are sitting has been joined by a girl with thick black curls who’s leaning a little too far over Gendry’s side. 

Mya’s sipping her ale politely, but Gendry’s red as a beet and can’t seem to meet the woman’s eye. Arya starts to laugh as she sits down at the spare chair, and lays a possessive hand on Gendry’s wrist. 

“Afraid we can’t spare the coin for your services, so you’d be best spending your energy elsewhere.”

The woman nods. 

Arya cocks her head as the woman retreats. As soon as she is out of earshot Arya chuckles. 

“Oh thank the gods,” Gendry mutters, still red in the face, “I was one inch away from claiming you were my wife and were right outside.”

Arya feels her ears turn pink.

“It’s good you don’t seem interested, she looked like she could have been one of your sisters too.”

“She said her name was Bella,” Mya interjects from the otherside of the table. 

“We’ll add Bella to the list then. The lost bastards of House Baratheon.”

The three of them leave in the morning with Harwin riding ahead. The temperature has turned and every day gets colder and colder. Nymeria circles closer to them at night, and the wind turns. Every once and a while they have to ride further into the wood because other riders appear, and they don’t know who they are. They could be Tully men, but the Riverlands are too central. Lannisters could ride north, the kingsmen could have followed them west, and bandits are a problem across all the kingdoms. 

Eventually the inn comes into view, a squat building in a clearing. There’s not much activity until they approach, but there is smoke coming from the chimney. When they dismount their horses, a young woman with brown hair and a long face comes through the door. 

“Told you we can’t take any more orphans Harwin, we have enough of a time keeping track of this lot.”

After she says that, another girl, maybe Arya’s age, and looking much like she comes out too, flanked by a gaggle of children of many ages. 

“One or two might be orphans true,” Harwin starts, “But they need far less looking after.”

The woman- Harwin had told them her name was Jeyne- looks them up and down. 

"Are people looking for you?"

Arya nods softly.

"Do they know what you look like?"

The three of them exchange a glance, and Arya shrugs.

"Don't think so."

“What can you lot do for us?”

“I’m a smith,” Gendry speaks. “I can fix anything you might need, even if travelers don’t come by much.”

“And I can hunt,” Arya adds, “Could be useful at keeping the small ones fed.”

“We have two horses with us,” Mya says last, “And I’m good enough at fetching and carrying.”

Arya looks at Jeyne, pleadingly she hopes. Eventually, she sighs. 

“Good enough,” she says, lips pressing into a line. “Come on in and get warm, you too Harwin.”

Harwin enters the inn first, the smell of hot stew on the fire enticing them away from the cold. 

Arya reaches out to hold Gendry’s hand. 

“Winter is coming,” she says, “In winter you shouldn’t say no to a hot meal and a bed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Played some geographical pin the tail on the donkey with the location of the Inn, but I figure that's far from the worst of the artistic license sins I could commit.


	8. Chapter 8

It’s six years before the war ends and Arya sees any of her family again.

Winter’s in it’s fullest glory by the time it ends. The inn is off the beaten path, and in winter, few travelers come to stay. The ice makes the roads treacherous and the soft snow drifts blanket the open land and lessens the ability of even a single traveler to approach quietly. 

From the relative safety of the inn, Arya pieces together the truth. Of Littlefinger’s having managed to convince multiple people in the Red Keep to trust him. She turns it over and over in her head, trying to figure out how he managed it. After Jon Arryn- something must have let it slip that he had found several of Robert’s bastards, and he hatched his scheme to use them to bait Cersei and eventually play her and Robert against each other.

They learn from the scarce travelers before winter sets in that Robb has gone to war over Ned’s execution. It makes Arya proud, though she is terrified for her brothers. They learn that the Tully’s of Riverrun have come to his side, which makes her feel safe, but the Riverlands are pressed right up against the Westerlands and the Lannisters remain loyal to their king. Lannister soldiers have already begun making incursions, and any journey away from the inn carries the fear of their banners. 

Though Arya has a hard time being truly frightened when she knows Nymeria is keeping so close. As winter creeps in, she begins to have to hurt further and further away to find game big enough to sustain her. 

Within the inn though, life goes on. 

There’s a dozen or so orphans sheltering under the same roof as the Heddle sisters, ranging from still awkwardly toddling to nearly grown. They have an unusual array of skills. 

They have among them, three very simple bows. None of them have much skill shooting them. 

Arya plucks the bowstring with a finger. She thinks back hard to those nights stolen in the Godswood with Bran. The bow had seemed so much less attractive than the sword. 

“I can teach any of them who want,” she tells Jeyne in the last year of autumn. 

And that’s how Arya ended up in the little patch of land beside the garden, surrounded by a gaggle of children. Jeyne and Willow are off to the side, digging up the last of the season’s potatoes and turnips to freeze in the cellar, as they watch. 

The oldest two, Teo and Thea, the children of a deceased hunter and trapper, pick it up with ease. The others are a mixed bag. 

When Madge, a girl of eleven, lets her arrow slip for the fourth time in a row, Arya sees the tears prick at her eyes and silently pulls her aside. 

“Deep breath. Remember you can’t get worse than yesterday.”

Madge follows her lead, and this time the arrow flies free, though it does not hit. 

Once the children all tire, and Arya is pleased with their progress, Jeyne stands and calls them in for supper. 

“Have you seen Gendry?” Arya asks Willow while she gathers the dug up veggies to store in the root cellar. 

Willow raises an eyebrow. 

“Hardly ever see him at all except with you. Probably out in the forge like always.”

The inn had a small forge that once housed a blacksmith, who Jeyne told them had gotten married and left for better pastures at the end of summer. Gendry had thrown himself into getting it back into shape, and as the cold crept in, spent nearly all his days clearing it out and getting things working again. Arya feels like he might even sleep out here if she let him. 

Today, he’s got the forge lit and is pounding something on the anvil. Arya stands back at the door, and just watches him work for a bit, the muscles in his arms playing under his skin, and the look of deep concentration on his face. 

Doing this lets her pretend this is all normal. That she’s just a wife come to fetch her blacksmith husband for supper. 

Then he notices her, and his face falters slightly, and the fantasy breaks. 

“Suppertime,” she tells him, moving to sit on the bench where he’s working. He ducks his head, and makes a noncommital noise. 

She looks him up and down while he towels himself off and pulls his shirt back on. 

“I’m taking Teo and Thea on a hunt tomorrow,” she says, carefully, “Would you like to come?”

“I shouldn’t.”

Arya steps closer to him, and lays one hand on his shoulder. 

“I know it’s hard. But you’re not going to wake up in that cellar again. Come with us tomorrow, it’s only four people. As long as you eat meals with us in the inn, I won’t bother you about it too much.”

She leans in a little closer, smelling the soot and sweat on his neck. It’s nice, strangely so. 

“And if you stay all through supper and clean up, I’ll let you sneak me back out here after.”

A smile quirks on the corner of Gendry’s mouth. 

“We have our own rooms, why not just sneak me upstairs?”

Arya chuckles, and presses a kiss to that corner. 

“Have some sense of adventure.”

He does stay in through supper, even plays a card game or two. And later, they go out to put out the forge, and spend quite a long time putting their kissing to practice. They walk back to the inn hand in hand, not even to any questions 

The hunt the next day goes smoothly. The last of the red and gold leaves are still clinging to the trees, but the wind comes from the north and Arya can tell it won’t last long.

Teo and Thea are both good at the walking-in-silence thing, and have a few improvements on Arya’s simple snares. They plan to leave the close ones up, and check every few days. It takes less effort than having to have a proper hunt. 

The sun is high in the sky when Arya sees Teo still, she grasps Gendry’s hand, and they turn their heads as a young buck makes it’s way in to the clearing.

It’s large, it’s antlers fully grown, and it sniffs at the ground like it doesn’t even see them. Arya sees Teo move to pull his bowstring, and she stops him with a hand on the elbow. 

“I don’t know how to field dress a deer, and I don’t think even the four of us could carry it back.”

It’s good they’d seen it though. A buck wandering about the wood meant there was plenty of game still. 

They net a few fat hares, that they string up and carry back. They’re close to the inn, when Arya’s ears perk up, hearing a howl. 

“Wolves howl to call to others,” Arya quietly tells Gendry, “Maybe Nymeria’s found herself a friend.”

Or a mate, she thinks with a pang in her heart. She’s glad they left the buck, she would not want her friend to hunger in the woods. 

“What did you think of your first hunt?” she asks Gendry. 

He shrugs, “Seemed just like a bunch of walking around to me.”

Arya remembers the journey south from Winterfell, remembers how King Robert nearly doubled their travel time by constantly wanting to stop and hunt. It seems nearly a life time ago.

The hares are an excellent haul though, making a fabulous stew for supper, and the skins will be taken the next time Mya goes into the village to trade.

And the next morning, a disemboweled and mostly eaten buck appears in front of the inn. Maerie, the youngest of the orphans, goes green and starts crying when she sees it, and Arya tries to remove it as quickly as possible. There’s enough bits of meat left for Jeyne to make some sausages at least. Teo tries to help her Arya it, but they still make a mess of it. 

“I’ll still take it with me,” Mya tells them, “Might still fetch a few coins.” 

That night, Arya stares out the window of the inn during supper.

“She’s still trying to take care of me,” she comments to Gendry. 

“This must seem wonderful to her,” is his response, “This whole big open wood, after being cooped up within the Red Keep.”

She’s not sure he’s still talking about Nymeria.

The chill stays in the air, and eventually, the snow begins to fall. It blankets the ground and piles onto the roof. The younger children hardly have time for mischief making after spending the mornings clearing what needs to be cleared. 

Sometimes in the mornings or in the dark nights, Arya will hear Nymeria howling again. 

It’s during another hunt, that Arya spots Nymeria across a long meadow, two smaller wolves behind her. Arya stares, and smiles. 

At supper that night, Thea demands she tell the story. One by one, all of the orphans, and Willow even, turn to her at the table. Arya’s unused to having even one eye on her. And with a deep breath, she starts. 

“My father and my brothers went hunting one day. They found a mother direwolf who had died, in a fight with a stag. Both of the animals had died, but the mother wolf had six pups. My father thought it might be better to put them out of their misery-”

Her heart squeezes at the symbolism of that. 

“But my younger brother Bran pleaded with out father, and he relented and let my brother take the pups home. Six of them, one for each of us. Grey Wind, Ghost, Lady, Summer, Shaggydog…”

She waits, and listens, maybe even imagines that she hears another howl. 

“...and Nymeria. They’ve been by our sides ever since, though they are now much too large to live inside. I used to let her sleep at the foot of my bed, until she got too big. When we ran, she followed us the whole way. She will not harm anyone who is not a threat to me, and no one will harm me if she is near.”

“The buck-” Madge remembers, “That was her?”

Arya nods,

“I think she was pleased we left her her meal.”

All of orphans’ are now looking out the window in near silence, as though hoping for a glimpse. Gendry remains in his spot, but he’s looking at her with something in his face she can’t place. 

Afterwards, In the cold night, Arya walks back with Gendry to put out the forge. He holds her hand tightly the whole way, their boots scraping against the gathering snow. 

“I used to wonder,” he nearly whispers, breath going cloudy from the cold, “if the way I felt about you was just because I went so many years barely even seeing other women...but watching you with the orphans, teaching them things, telling them stories...you really are incredible you know that.”

Arya flushes a deep crimson. 

“They’re pack,” she suddenly realizes, “Maybe not the same one I used to think of, with Jon and my family and our household..and you. But they’re their own pack, and they’ve let us in.”

They’ve made it back to the forge, and Gendry’s cleaned out the ashes while she tells him this. Once he finishes, he sits at his workbench, fishing around for something wrapped in a flannel.

“I made you this,” he says, offering it to her. Arya unwraps it slowly, revealing a hunting knife.

“It’s not flowers, but-”

Arya swallows, remembering the flowers that wilted in her braid until they flew free in the wind.

“There aren’t many flowers now. And not much need for them in winter.”

She moves beside him on the bench, raised up on her knees, carefully setting the knife down before she wraps her arms around his neck and rests her forehead on his. 

“I love it. And I guess I should thank Mya for her advice.”

He laughs bashfully. 

“I had to ask someone. I told you before I don’t know anything about girls.”

Arya holds him a little tighter. 

“Well it seems you know enough about Arya.”

The snow keeps falling, and a routine establishes. 

Everyone wakes to break their fast, usually porridge now that the mills can’t turn anymore and flour jumps in price. Chores are divied up, and argued over. Mya often rides one of the horses into the nearest village for supplies and news. Gendry still spends most of his day in the forge, making small repairs to things around that always seem to need mending, or else shoveling and fetching and climbing and hauling. Sometimes Arya hunts with Teo and Thea, sometimes she checks her traps, sometimes she helps Jeyne and Willow keep up the inn. 

She’s never done much in the way of cooking or cleaning, but she’s good at watching, and imitating. 

It’s during one of these days, watching Jeyne press out cheese, when Willow asks her, 

“How come you haven’t married the blacksmith, since the two of you like making moony eyes at each other so much?”

Arya sputters a bit. They’ve done their best not to share too many details of their background with anyone here, for their own safety as much as their privacy. She’s pretty sure Jeyne and Willow at least recognize her as a highborn, even though she doesn’t often act the role. She smiles roughly before answering. 

“I’d like to, never thought I’d say that. Not sure I could convince him to. Still thinks someone will pop out from behind a tree to behead him for so much as holding my hand.”

“You should say something,” Jeyne tells her, with a wry grin, “Man who looks like him wouldn’t be lonely long if he tried, if he wanted to try. Not to mention that a blacksmith in spring could find work wherever he chose. The way he looks at you though, you can’t just find that anywhere.”

It’s practical advice, which is apparently Jeyne’s specialty. Arya doesn’t say anything else while they rub the cheese with ash and stack them to carry to the cellar. Her words are on her mind for several months though. 

It’s on Mya’s journeys into the village that they hear any news at all of the war. Most of the news is grim, tales of Lannister raids further north. She brings a story or two of Robb Stark, the young wolf, who some said could turn into a wolf himself. Arya wishes it were true. 

Mya spends much of her day in the stables, as Gendry does the forge, though her solitude is more practical. The stables have been empty for so long that they must be constantly kept up. She tries to insulate the best she can, so that the horses (nicknamed Nettle and Briar by her) will be comfortable. Both have grown their winter coats in, and are quite happy to be sure, frolicking outside and being ridden in turn. When the snow doesn’t fall, they still dig through the blanket, seeking grass.

One day, nearly a year or so into winter, Arya sits in the stable on the top rung of the ladder to the hayloft. Gendry sticks his head in. 

“Thought you were going to town with Mya today?”

Arya shakes her head, and Gendry climbs the ladder to join her, and she takes his hand. The hayloft is warm enough, dry and sweet smelling. 

“Just thinking about...stuff,” she admits. They’re both quiet for quite a long time, Arya holding his hand in her lap. He wraps an arm around her, and she twists so she can crawl into his lap and kiss him. His lips are as warm as his hands.

It’s after several long, blissful, moments, that Arya’s hands wind in the fabric of his tunic, and her eyes meet his. Their hands have explored each other, often and extensively, but they’ve always gone over or under, never taken off.

“I love you,” she murmurs, her hands still holding still.

Gendry is quiet for a time, before responding, 

“I love you too, for as long as you’ll have me.”

Arya’s face sprouts a huge grin, and she lifts her hands and pulls the tunic over his head. 

“For as long as we have.”

And no one but the horse was there to see their winter-pale bodies, moving against each other in the dark of the hayloft, shivering and grasping, soft moans carried on the wind. 

The next morning, Arya privately asks Jeyne if she has the ingredients for moon tea. Jeyne sighs, long and resigned, and makes Arya keep close eye when she pulls out and measures the herbs from her medicine stash. 

“Mint, wormwood, tansy, pennyroyal, honey. No more than a few leaves of the tansy or the pennyroyal or you will become quite ill. You don’t actually need the honey, but it tastes vile otherwise. Go with Mya when she goes to the village next week, or I’ll have run out of mint. I suggest restraining yourself until then.”

Arya hadn’t really expected things to change because of it, but somehow they still do. Good changes though. The butterflies that would flutter in her stomach have settled, now they just rise in her chest like the sun when he touches her. Gendry slips so easily into her bed it’s like he was meant to be there. 

Arya loves the little life they’ve dug out here. Even through the coughs and fevers, the weeks where they can’t even catch a squirrel and have nothing but broth and thin porridge to eat, through the tantrums and fights the children somehow manage to find even in the coldest days. 

But she hates it too.

One night, Gendry rolls to one side and wakes to hear Arya, laying flat on her back, reciting a series of names. 

“Whattryou doing?”

Arya squeezes her eyes. 

“When I can’t sleep, I recite names. Names of people I don’t want to forget.”

“Where were you at?”

“Jon, Robb, Sansa, Bran, Rickon,” she recites, then leaves her family and moves past, “Mycah, Harwin, Tommen…”

She eventually runs out of names and falls asleep. 

It might be easy out here, to forget her life before this, in Winterfell. With a start, Arya realizes she’s past twenty and hasn’t been to Winterfell in nearly half her life. 

It wouldn’t be safe to try and go home though. The further into winter, the more stories Mya’s trips bring them. Some say that the Lannisters briefly took Harrenhal, which is far too close for comfort. There are stories of the destruction reaped by the Mountain as he rode the countryside. 

The stories are frightening enough, that the handful of times a rider approaches the inn, Arya, Gendry, Mya and the youngest children make themselves scarce, upstairs, in the smallest bedroom with the largest window. 

Arya shushes the children during these times. 

“You have to be quiet, even your feet could give you away. Imagine you are ghosts, “

Yet in every case, the traveler is simply seeking ale or a meal and leaves after. 

It’s nearly her twenty-first year, during a long walk in the snow, when her and Gendry make the discovery. It’s one of those rare winter days, the entire land blanketed in snow, but bright and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. A day you could nearly mistake for summer until the cold nipped at your nose. 

It had come after a week’s blizzard had kept everyone inside and driven nearly all of them, even ever good-natured Willow, insane. So when Arya announced she needed to take a walk in the woods, Gendry was quick to join her. 

They’re walking through what was once a meadow, when Arya stops short. 

“Oh,” Arya exclaims, nearly with tears in her eyes, “I didn’t know they grew this far south. I’ve never heard of a weirwood south of the Neck.”

The tree is small, dwarfed even by the leafless skeletons of the forest around it, but it’s white bark and few red leaves are unmistakable. It has no face, but Arya still falls to her knees to pray. 

After a moment, she reaches for Gendry’s hand and pulls him down into the snow beside her. 

“I told you,” she starts, “About how we perform weddings in the north?”

His eyes flicker up the trunk and back to hers, wanting, but unwilling to be fooled.

“If you’re certain.”

“I am,” she had once feared that this was all her life was leading up to, but she could never imagined it could look like this. 

“We don’t need anyone else?”

Arya shakes her head, letting herself get lost in the blue of his eyes. 

“The Gods will see what they need to.”

Gendry nods. She hopes these years have been as good for him as they have for her. He’s got color to his face now, he talks to the children when she is not near. He has lost some of his hunch, and stands tall. 

She tells him the words, and he repeats them. There might be some blending of traditions, but she’s always liked the sound of “I am hers and she is mine.” His cloak swamps her, and strictly speaking, she thinks you’re not supposed to giggle while praying. 

Gendry reaches forward to lift her with sudden ferocity. 

“I’m sorry I have no name to give you,” he says, a breath away from her lips. 

She shrugs him off. 

“Out here neither of us have names. We live as ghosts.”

They kiss, and Arya smiles and whispers to him about the last part of the marriage tradition. It’s worth risking frostbite for, the two of them pressed together, bare, between both of their cloaks. Afterwards, he scoops her up and carries her until they are out of eyesight of that strange, southern weirwood. 

They pass Nymeria from afar near the inn on their way back, with a litter of pups behind her.

Winter continues. Maerie stops knocking into everything when she walks, Pen gains his last few consonants. Teo and Thea are full grown now, and will likely leave the inn come spring to forge their own path. 

Mya spends more and more time in the village. Willow suspects she’s found a sweetheart there, though she insists it’s just to make sure she doesn’t overwork Nettle and Briar. 

Crocuses come up through the snow. Lya squeals when she sees them, but Arya warns her not to get too excited, for they bloom in winter too. 

It’s sometime past Arya’s twenty and second name day, that Lya runs through the front door of the inn, saying riders are approaching. 

Arya’s voice catches in her throat, but she has enough presence of mind to grab Gendry and Mya and head upstairs. 

She peers through the window. It’s a clear day, another clear day. When the riders approach, Arya is shocked to see that there are three of them. 

“They don’t look like soldiers,” Gendry assures her.

Arya squints. Something about them looks familiar. 

Eventually, one of the rider’s turns their head, and a bit of hair escapes from under their cloak. 

Arya’s breath is stolen away. She jerks violently, and pulls Gendry’s arm. 

“That’s my sister,” she says in shock, “That’s Sansa.”

The tiny little glimpse, a bit of bright red hair on the head of a tall, poised, young woman, is all she needs. 

Willow has gone out to greet them, and Arya finds she still has more air to be taken away. 

One of the figures is Harwin, more lines in his face, more gray in his hair. The other is a mop of red curls Arya can’t quite place until it hits her. 

“Rickon,” she breathes. He had been just a little boy the last time she’d seen him, would he even remember her?

She turns to Gendry, and pleads him with her eyes. 

“You don’t have to come with me,”

“No,” he replies, nearly harshly. “We agreed before, I go where you go. We’ll find out what’s happened together.”

She nods, and with an unsteady gait, stands, and they both turn to descend the Inn’s stairs and face the future.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...hehe :checks dates: Better late than never?

Most of Westeros is blanketed in snow now, winter having well and truly come. 

As they leave for the north, Arya finds herself constantly looking over her shoulder. The journey to the inn those years ago had been nearly idyllic. Now there was potentially war on all sides. 

That day at the Inn, Sansa and Rickon had told them of all that had happened once they had spirited themselves away from the capital. 

“Edric and I escaped from the city using the secret passages,” Sansa explains, “The maps of them you gave father helped. No one followed us, and Renly got us on a ship, we’ve both been hidden in Storm’s End the past six years.”

Her voice goes thin for a moment, her face pale. 

“We didn’t hear about Father until we reached ground.”

Arya smiles, thinking of Sansa creeping through the tunnels out of the Red Keep in her beautiful ball gown. Whatever these years have thrown at her, she has clearly survived. Sansa’s looking at her almost ashamed, as though she is going to blame her for her Ned. 

“Robb raised the banners over father’s death- he wasn’t even given the choice to go to the Wall instead- and that’s how the war started.”

The war has come to the inn only in stories and rumors, and only about the might of armies and villages burning, nothing about the movements of the kings and pawns. 

Sansa shakes her head as she talks. 

“You were so lucky. The Lannister raids on the Riverlands would have been far worse if the snow and frozen rivers hadn’t impeded their movements.”

Despite this, Sansa speaks of riding through the Riverlands into the Crownlands, and passing several villages that have been razed.

Most of them, she said, believed to be at the hands of the Mountain.

The king had only a few houses on his side. Rumours of his birth had spread through the Stormlands and even to Dorne. Despite the king’s insanity, he was backed only by the Westerlands and the Reach, in hopes of possibly sealing a marriage deal for the king’s hand for Margaery. 

Sansa shakes her head again.

“I would say he didn’t have a chance, but the Westerlands are the richest of the seven kingdoms...and Joffrey turned out to be even more insane than we could have imagined.”

She tells tales of men on the streets of King’s Landing being press ganged into the army, dressed as soldiers and being sent to the front lines to be slaughtered. The attackers had no way of knowing they were moving down millers and shopkeepers and orphan boys with paper armor. 

And it wasn’t like the forces fighting the king were at all united.

“The Riverlands pledged their support because of Mother, but both Renly and Stannis believed themselves to be the true heir to the throne. They fought over it endlessly. It was obnoxious.”

Arya nods. Honestly, she understands the laws of inheritance, but can’t find energy to care even a tiny bit about who wins. 

Sansa’s face turns grave again. 

“Two years ago a fever swarmed several of the army camps in the north. Mother caught it and passed away. Ten moons ago, Robb was slain on the battlefield.”

Arya’s stomach churns. She might have fallen if Gendry hadn’t grabbed onto and held her. Gendry, who’s been sitting by her side this whole time, listening with her even though his face screams he understands very little of it. 

Sansa’s face remains downcast. Their orphans now, Arya thinks, all of the Starks. Orphans. 

“What-” she starts, voice stuttering, “What makes the two of you come and find us now? What’s changed?”

Sansa smiles grimly. 

“The discussion of succession became a moot point. Danaerys Targaryan returned to King’s Landing four moons ago to reclaim her throne. The war is basically over.”

Arya blinks. Gendry looks even more confused. Word travels slowly in winter, it seems.

“Rickon sailed from White Harbour to Weeping Town to bring me home. We've been in Winterfell the last moon, searching for what became of you, any word at all. It's lucky we happened upon Harwin, or we might have-well... It’s safe for us all to return to Winterfell now. We have to, we have to figure out-”

She takes a deep breath. 

“We have to figure out what the fuck we’re going to do.”

Arya flinches at Sansa’s language. 

Even knowing that they should be safe, leaving the Inn is one of the hardest things Arya has ever done. When they tell the others that they plan to leave in the morning, several of the younger children weep. Arya feels like it too. 

Even Thea asks, her voice thin, if they will ever come back.

Arya meets Gendry’s eye. 

“We don’t know.”

After Sansa and Rickon have taken their leave to rest, Arya and Gendry sit with Jeyne and Willow in the kitchen, drinking dried mint they can pretend is tea.

“I suppose we’ll have two less mouths to feed,” Jeyne comments, belying her misty eyes.

“Two less bodies to scrub and hunt for us though,” Willow adds. 

Arya frowns. 

“Teo and Thea are as good in the woods and us, and none of the children are allergic to scrubbing floors.”

At least winter is coming to an end, or so it seems. 

They offer to take Mya, and Arya is surprised when she refuses. 

“I have a place here, a job. I like what I’ve become.”

She grabs Gendry by the hand and squeezes. 

“Make sure to visit if you can.”

They will ride to King’s Landing, and take a ship the rest of the way North. Arya can’t believe they are willingly returning to the city, not after everything.

Gendry complains the whole way. Arya rolls her eyes and accepts that she will be riding alone the rest of her life. 

She had told Sansa about them when her and Rickon had arrived, and Sansa had barely seemed to register her words. This changed the first night on the road, when she watched the two of them curl up together under their furs, Gendry murmuring grouchily about the cold and Arya presses kisses into the back of his neck before wrapping him in her arms and assuring him that her warmth is his too.

It’s early one morning over the breakfast fire that Arya first notices Sansa watching her. 

“What?”

Sansa smiles, a little sadly. 

“It’s so strange seeing you like this, a woman grown and wed. It seems like the last I saw you we were both just girls.”

Arya smiles too. 

“It has been six years, I imagine you’ve probably changed some too.”

Sansa has grown into her looks, having become womanly rather than girlish, wearing her hair and gowns simply, as becoming of a Lady of the north. 

“What is Storm’s End like?” Arya asks. She knows very little of Westeros south of King’s Landing. 

Sansa smiles, almost wistfully. 

“Hot, but not like King’s Landing. It’s right on the water and everything smells of salt all the time. And as winter came closer, so did the storms. Rain and hail and wind for days on end. It made staying inside with books quite nice.”

“Do you miss it?”

“I may,” Sansa says, “But I’m needed in Winterfell, and it's nice to be there again.”

Arya is too, but her eagerness is more conflicted. 

Gendry doesn’t take well to seeing King’s Landing again, and he takes even less well to travel by ship. When the rocking gets to him, he just stays shut up in the cabin the five of them share. Arya stays under, to tend to him.

“Don’t be such a baby,” she starts, handing him bits of dry bread, “It’s just seasickness.”

He sulks a lot more after that. But after a while, he begins to talk. 

“I hate this,” he admits, “Down here I feel like I’m in the cellar again. And…”

He cuts off, before continuing.

“Winterfell frightens me. Despite your stories...I still just can’t see it as anywhere that I could belong.”

Arya studies his face. She’s sitting close to him, close enough that she can take his hand and hold it in her own, in her lap. 

“I’m scared too,” she admits, “I was never good at being a lady even when I was being trained day in and day out to be one. Who knows what I’ll have forgotten about now? And…”

Her voice goes softer, more uncertain.

“I haven’t been at Winterfell since I was one and ten years old. Even calling it my home feels strange.”

Arya hasn’t seen Bran in six years. She hasn’t seen him since before his accident. Sansa still somehow feels like a total stranger some of the time, when she watches her speak competently to the crew. Rickon barely seems to recognize her. 

And she can’t even grasp the idea of Winterfell without Father, who’s death she has mourned, without Mother and Robb, who’s deaths she hasn’t. Even without Jon, who’s been at the Wall for a decade now. Who would probably feel even more out of place than she does right now returning to Winterfell.

Her nerves don’t ease when their ship approaches White Harbour. 

Winter has clearly come to the North. Even White Harbour is blanketed in snow, and they end up having to shelter at Castle Cerwyn for several days while a storm blocks the road. 

Gendry has never seen a northern blizzard, with snow and hail and lightning and the fog and deep, deep darkness for days on end. He doesn’t think much of it.

Arya teases him, but inside she hates seeing him so uncomfortable. At the inn, she’d gotten used to him seeming at ease, laughing, even smiling on occasion.

And then the storm clears and they ride again, and Winterfell rises from the horizon.

The dark stone contrasts against the bright white snow, and somehow the castle seems even more vast than it had in Arya’s childhood memory. Mayhaps she’s grown to used to small things, cozy things, these past years. 

And looking around the people as they walk through the gate, Arya is even more uncomfortable as she realizes she doesn’t recognize hardly anyone, the courtyards are a sea of unfamiliar faces.

And Gendry is clinging to her arm, and Sansa reaches out and squeezes her other. 

“Take it slow,” she tells her, “Seeing Bran especially will no doubt be a shock.”

Bran right now, feels sometimes as if he’s a ghost in his own home. Though his broken bones had healed, walking for more than a few steps still resulted in great pain and instability. The Dornish wheeled chair had been like a gift from the gods at the end of the day when his muscles cried for relief. 

One of the messengers had alerted him. 

“Lord Stark, there are visitors to see you. Lady Sansa and Lord Rickon have returned with Lady Arya.”

This brightens Bran up greatly. He hates asking the servants for help, so he pushes the wheels and his chair creaks its way along the empty hallways. 

The group has been brought from the front gate to Father's (Bran's, Arya corrects) solar, so they can reunite in private. 

Arya’s stomach turns itself over, seeing Bran. She’d known of his injuries, but seeing her active little brother like this, rendered shorter than her again, still nearly undoes her. 

She still rushes forward and embraces him. 

“We’ve missed so much,” she says, sniffling.

Bran strokes her hair. 

“There will be time for all of that,”

His eyes trail to the other, pausing on Gendry but not lingering. 

“But hopefully not all tonight, come on, lets all have supper.”

They eat in his solar rather than in the Great Hall that night. It’s a sumptuous meal of roast venison. Somehow it’s just not as satisfying as stew made with the single squirrel Arya had found in her traps that day, or the cheese and bread she’d helped prepare. 

“I still can’t believe I’m here,” Bran admits, “I was never meant to be Lord of Winterfell. Then mother passed, and then Robb….and it feels like I’ve been all alone. I even wrote to Jon at the wall-”

He turns to Arya. 

“He’s coming to visit within the week. Wants to seek any new recruits we can send.”

Arya brightens noticeably at the possibility of seeing Jon again. 

The rest of the meal passes with Bran and Rickon talking about holding on to Winterfell during the war. He cuts off both Arya and Sansa cutting in. 

“Your stories for another day,” he says, “No need to bog us all down before most of you sleep in beds for the first night in some time.”

He dismisses them, and they find their way to their assigned chambers. 

Arya childhood room is the way she left it, bare of most of her personal effects, furs askew. 

“Your bed’s awfully tiny,” Gendry comments with a smirk while they undress. 

Arya raises an eyebrow and puts one hand on her hip before lifting her shift over her head and throws it aside. She reaches out and pushes him on the chest so he tumbles back onto the featherbed. 

“I think we can manage to fit,” she says, an inch from his lips, before covering them with hers. 

Maybe making love in her childhood bed ought to make her feel more uncomfortable than it does. All it does is remind her of how far she’s come from the child she was here.

The next day, there’s a flurry of activity that Arya feels like she’s on the outside of, looking in.

Rickon leaves to go north, planning to meet with Jon’s party and join them. Bran shakes his head, saying after all these years Rickon still didn’t like being inside. 

Sansa sits with Bran while they go over the work for the day, and Sansa tells Arya a little bit about Daenarys Targaryen and how she returned to Westeros. It is a good story, Arya admits. 

She would wonder if she could ever get to see her someday, but sees Gendry’s face at the thought of having to return to King’s Landing puts the kibosh on that. 

The next morning, Gendry goes off to find the castle forge. It’s winter, so of course, the smiths are working it, to stay warm with the fire. He watches. Arya watches with him.

The day after that, the two of them tell their story. Sansa’s moved, and even Bran looks reverent. Arya turns a bit red when they praise it, praise her bravery. None of them bat at eye at her marriage. 

After that, Arya takes Gendry to the crypts, and tells him all the stories that she remembers. 

“You’re my husband,” she insists, “These stories are yours now as well.”

One night, during supper, Bran admits that they believe they know what actually happened to him. 

“Cersei apparently had some suspicion that Father was on to her, so she had the Mountain knock me from my horse and break my leg as a distraction for him.”

His eyes are bagged and wane at the thought, and Arya’s appalled. She thinks of how he looked afterwards.

She tries not to think of the villages in the Riverlands that the Mountain razed. 

Rickon soon returns with Jon, and they hold a feast. 

Arya helps Gendry dress for it, in clothes that used to be Robb’s, or Jon’s. 

“You’ll do fine,” she insists, “The ones who would judge you aren’t here.”

Jon is taller and broader, and has a beard now, but he is still her favorite brother, and he picks and twirls her just like she were still tiny. He still eyes Gendry with a protective eye, easing off watching her grin. 

They eat, drink and be merry, and it’s the most at home Arya’s felt in so long. 

The next day, she finds Sansa lingering over a letter from Storm’s End. 

“It was hard to leave,” she admits, “It had become, well...and it was hard to leave Edric.”

“How is Edric?” Arya asks, wondering after her good brother.

Sansa bites her lip. 

“The poison did some permanent damage to him. He has a tremor in his hands. I used to help him pen his letters. I feel awful that he must have to get someone else to do it now.”

She pauses a long time. Arya stares, as if to will her words out of her. 

“Before we left, before the war actually ended, he asked if I would marry him.”

Arya’s briefly astonished, and then laughs to herself that she had once thought to push them together. 

“Do you want to?”

Sansa laughs. 

“I think I do. It’s so strange, it’s not anything like I thought it would be as a girl, but…”

She smiles, and not for anyone who can see. 

“We’ve become dear friends these past years. I like that he knows me, sees me...wants me for something other than to look pretty on his arm. But...we both talked and decided it wasn’t a good time. Renly’s not exactly long in the tooth yet, so it works out.”

Arya blinks, confused. 

“Why isn’t it a good time?”

Sansa looks at her, slightly askew. 

“Well I hadn’t gotten to go home yet...and Bran needs me here for a little while at least. He’s still working on learning to run this place. At least until I can help him find himself a wife. And besides...it probably wouldn’t look good to the Queen if I married him right away.”

Arya wrinkles her nose. 

“What do you mean”

Sansa’s gaze turns equal parts pitying and fond. 

“He’s a Baratheon. When Daenarys came to Westeros, she still called Robert the Usurper. It was ages until she believed that Stannis and Renly would put aside their designs on the throne and bend the knee to them.”

Oh. That makes sense, Arya thinks. She shakes her head though. Politics and how it gets in the way of so much. 

“But why now?”

Sansa shakes her head too. 

“There’s part of the story I’ll leave to Jon and Bran.”

The very next day, she drags it out of them. They’re in Bran’s solar, working on numbers for the Night’s Watch.

“After Father was executed,” Bran tells her, “His men named Robb King in the North.”

Arya’s eyes go wide. Robb, a king of winter, like in the old stories. 

“It was a hell of a thing to read in a letter,” Jon adds. 

“We’d been operating as if an independent kingdom since then,” Bran continues, “You didn’t hear?”

Arya shakes her head. 

“It’s winter, news travels slower. And we were off the beaten path as well.”

“And after mother and Robb died both...morale had fallen so bad, so many had died. It’s been a hard winter on the food stores, as well as the war...When Daenarys came, I bent the knee to her.”

Bran rubs his forehead. Arya smiles, seeing the thoughtful man her brother has grown into. Maybe his injury wasn’t the worst thing to happen to him. 

“Some of the northmen were furious, but it was what I thought was right. I didn’t want to drag us into another war, one we weren’t prepared for.”

This must be what Sansa meant, Arya thought, when she talked about them figuring out what to do. The thought of the politics makes her head hurt already. 

It hits Arya. Sansa and Edric marrying would be seen as a union between the Usurper’s family and a kingdom who had recently rebelled. It could tun the crown against them. With a lurch, she realizes her own marriage, in secret, to another of the Usurper's bastards, would make it worse. 

It wasn’t fair, Arya thought. Sansa deserved happiness too.

“I’m so glad to have you all here,” Bran admits, “Because sometimes I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know if what I’m doing here is right. I'm barely getting a grasp on Lord of Winterfell, I could have never been a King in the North. So I’m glad your here,” his glance turns to Jon and then to Arya, “At least for a little while.”

“Yes,” Arya replies with a smirk, “Sansa mentioned finding you a wife.”

Bran covers his face in his hands again, and tall, willowy, and all of twenty years old, proclaims. 

“Girls are scary.”

Later that night, she finds Gendry outside the forge again. 

“You could ask if you can work too,” she tells him, “Or step in after they’ve finished for the night.”

“I think I will,” Gendry replies. “I don’t know how you can stand being idle so much.”

Arya doesn’t defend herself. She’s not been idle, but walking the grounds and reacquainting herself with the people of Winterfell doesn’t feel like proper work either. So when the other smiths leave, and Gendry begins to work into the night, she stays and watches him.

An hour or two later, Jon finds her watching. He smiles, and just stands with her. 

“We don’t belong here anymore do we?” she asks him. 

“I don’t think I ever did, little sister,” he tells her, ruffling her hair, “But this was where you were born, your birthright.”

“My birthright was to be married off and bear sons and greet guests for some Lord in his own castle,” she corrects him, holding a long pause and a gaze towards Gendry before continuing, “I don’t know if either of us can fit in here anymore.”

Jon looks at her. 

“Then I suggest the two of you find out what you want your place to be, because it’s not just going to find you.”

When they’re in bed later that night, Arya runs a finger along Gendry’s face.

“When the spring comes,” she begins slowly, “I think we should return to the inn.”

Gendry sits part way up, and looks at her. He cups her cheek. 

“I won’t have you abandoning the last of your family, just because I’m a sulky bastard who has a hard time making friends.”

Arya wrinkles her nose. 

“I’m not abandoning them,” she tells him, “They’ll know exactly where we are. They found us before after all, and letters can be sent. Especially in spring, especially in times of peace. And besides-”

She wiggles and straddles him, pressing her chest against his, and speaking with her face very close to him. 

“You’re my family too now. And if-when,” she cuts herself off, “We have children, I don’t want the highborn life for them.”

She tells him a little about Sansa and Edric, about how her romantic sister was because forced to put her own happiness aside because of something neither her or her betrothed had any control over. She mentions how their marriage could also hurt the Starks politically, if it became widely known. Blood, fathers, claims. 

Gendry shakes his head.

“There’s so much I grew up without…”

Arya smiles. 

“They will have two parents who love them, who care for them. I had that, but it’s not just for highborns. You can teach them how to smith, I can teach them to hunt, to ride, to read and write. Maybe even a little Valyrian. Maybe one day, they’ll find Nymeria’s pups and protect them.”

Her voice quiets a bit. 

“And you sell yourself short,” she tells. “A good smith can find work nearly anywhere. And a hand that can wield a hammer is a hand that can protect what it loves.”

Gendry pulls her to him. 

“Would you really be happy like that?” he asks, “A blacksmith’s wife, living in a ramhackle inn, knowing what a castle is like?”

Arya laughs. 

“When I met you, I wanted to run from the castle and disappear. Live in the woods with Nymeria, become a ghost. I’ve learned the merits and drawbacks of both. Life is what you make of it,” 

She kisses his jaw, and his neck, and his chest. 

“And I think we could make quite a nice one. Maybe they’ll tell stories about us. About the two ghosts of winter who disappeared off into the world.”

“They might say you were stolen away into the wilds.”

Arya grins, and hooks one of her legs up high around his hip. 

“Then we’ll tell better ones. The better ones will always win out. We’ll wait for spring, either way. We’ll wait until the snow south of the Neck melts at least. Until it's safer. ”

Gendry turns his head towards the window, where the snow is still falling. 

“Feels like that might be forever away.”

But winter ends, as winters do. The snowdrops poke their heads through the snow as it turns to slush. A year, a year and a half from then. 

The day they ride away from Winterfell, Arya hugs Sansa. 

“You know exactly where we are. When the wedding happens, send an announcement, Even if we can’t be there, we’ll raise a toast.”

They leave on horseback, with Rickon again. The wildest youngest Stark, Arya thought, who was as comfortable in the wilds even grown.

When they find the inn, Jeyne raises her head in shock, and Willows bounds ahead to meet them, pulling back in glee when she realizes Arya is swollen with child. Some of the children remain, others have left, some are new. The ones who remember run to them, showing off scars and talking over each other for who gets to tell them tales first. 

Mya returns later in the day, and squeezes Gendry's shoulder tightly. 

"It's good to have you back," she tells them.

They all settle in over the long table by the kitchen. Gendry holds her hand, as they tell their story.


End file.
